I keep in mind once I first realized concerning the water cycle, about the way it makes of our planet a residing world and binds the destiny of each molecule to that of each different. I keep in mind feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I noticed I used to be respiratory the breath of Aristotle and William Blake and Marie Curie, these precise molecules nonetheless lingering within the water vapor comprising the environment that makes the entire world breathe — a residing testomony to Lynn Margulis’s remark that “the truth that we’re linked by way of area and time exhibits that life is a unitary phenomenon.”
That wondrous interleaving of area, time, and being comes alive with unusual sweetness in The Misplaced Drop (public library) by Grégoire Laforce, illustrated by Benjamin Flouw — a vibrant love letter to the water cycle as a portal to deep time and deep presence, and a refined celebration of the ongoingness of life as a approach to bear our mortal smallness within the nice scheme of being.
The story, rendered with the charming feeling-tone of mid-century illustration, begins with somewhat drop named Flo, who falls from the sky and, upon hitting the bottom, is seized with the existential query that pulsates beneath each life:
Who am I and the place ought to I’m going?
She finds herself pulled by gravity down a slope and right into a stream — the portion of the water cycle known as runoff.
As she flows, she asks all of the rocks and bushes and animals nourished by the stream what her goal may be, however they only nod and smile.
The stream pours right into a lake stuffed with prehistoric sea creatures, and nonetheless she goes on questioning about her destiny. Then a waterfall leaps her into the air and plunges her into the darkish depths, nonetheless and silent.
She screams her query into the silence as she drifts towards the floor, till a sudden surge of daylight envelops her — the evaporation portion of the water cycle begins.
Flo grows smaller and smaller, then appears to turn into a part of the sunshine, virtually vanishing into the air — “however not fairly.”
Flo helped make the bushes dance,
and united the breath of all residing creatures,
and lifted wings into flight.
There’s homecoming within the sky because the condensation a part of the cycle returns Flo from vapor again to liquid, finally conferring that means upon her existence as a unit of aliveness and a particle of time, 4 billion years previous but ever-new.
Couple The Misplaced Drop with the lyrical What Is a River?, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the knowledge of rivers and Nan Shepherd on the may and thriller of water.
