I bear in mind once I first discovered 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 bear in mind feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I spotted I used to be respiration 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 statement that “the fact that we are connected through space and time shows that life is a unitary phenomenon.”
That wondrous interleaving of area, time, and being comes alive with unusual sweetness in The Lost 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 delicate celebration of the ongoingness of life as a technique 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 just a little 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 objective is perhaps, however they simply 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 out to be a part of the sunshine, nearly 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 may be homecoming within the sky because the condensation a part of the cycle returns Flo from vapor again to liquid, ultimately conferring that means upon her existence as a unit of aliveness and a particle of time, 4 billion years outdated but ever-new.
Couple The Lost Drop with the lyrical What Is a River?, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers and Nan Shepherd on the might and mystery of water.
