Rising Waters, Apocalypses, and Children’s Stories
Written by Anna Mudd; midwifed by Sara Jolena Wolcott
Illustrated by Anna Mudd
How do you prepare your young child for a world that is slowly going underwater? How do we simultaneously provide children with a deep sense of rootedness and grounding as they grow in an unraveling world, and give them the tools to see that unraveling and re-making as a source of profound necessary creativity? To be the tree, rooted; and the water, flowing. Simultaneously.
For those children who come from privileged families, how do we tell stories about our own families and our ancestors in ways that do not hide the painful fact that their ancestors were, most definitely part of the problem?
The birth of my son Robin, which so utterly re-orientated my world, turning my nights into walking days and my days into sleeping nights, initiated us into the journey of asking these questions.
Through Sequoia Samanvaya’s re-membering, re-enchanting and anticipating classes we practiced looking backwards and forwards, coupled with the twin creative works of practical skill building and imagination. To imagine what has not yet been, to re-visit and re-shape stories that we’ve been told about how our world came to be, and to re-enliven a world filled with non-human entities that we have been taught to understand as objects, commodities, and resources. To understand this original de-enchantment as part of the legacies of slavery, conceptions of nature as a machine to be mastered and exploited, and the colonization of indigenous land. As Sara Jolena says, our origin stories about who we are and where we come from need to change even as our planet is itself changing.
These are the questions of myth and legend: who are you, given where our world is now, and where we come from?
Adults have a myriad of literature to turn to. But where can children - and their parents - turn?
We turned to the world of children’s literature, which provides the enchanted landscapes we needed to go backwards and forwards in time and space, and to dwell in an animated landscape. Here, fantasy and myth, dream and facts, and the truth that is bigger than any one of these can intertwine, as a creative sea from which we could develop Robin’s ecological family history.
We describe these as ecological family histories.
An ecological family history is a way of looking back to understand where we came from in a way that is deeply tied to space and place.
A kind of family history in which telling the story of the money that sent me to a private college is simultaneously telling the story of the mountains in Colorado, the geological history that lead to deposits of precious metals there, and the history of the Ute people who had lived in those mountains for centuries, before being driven from the land in the years right before Seeley Mudd arrived as an assayer in 1885.
It would mean telling the story of the hills in Italy where my mother’s family lived, the spiders that are woven into their dances and folk songs, and the pigs and other animals that formed the basis of their livelihood when they arrived on this land from across the ocean.
I never learned the stories of the people who belonged to this land long before my ancestors arrived in a way that their stories felt bound to my own; where our ancestors inhabited the same world.
During our creative explorations, we found ourselves revolving around several themes:
Stars (upside-down and down-side up) (Where do we begin our family’s origin story? What mythical geographies of beginnings resonates with our particular experience? What points do we use to orient ourselves and move forward?)
Water (In the vastness of the heavens, where are we? What is this planet? What lies beneath the waters - the actual waters, as well as the waters of our subconscious that we have purposefully submerged?)
Spiders and Weaving (What old thread of a tradition in your family lineage brings wisdom for our current times?)
Dragonfly Eye Perspective (Every physical landscape, every temporal moment can be seen from multiple perspectives. There is no one story. How do we see multiple perspectives? Can we learn to have a dragonfly eye – one that sees many different perspectives simultaneously? Can we expand our stories to incorporate how other people see us?
In February 2020, we finished one stage of this project, releasing a booklet that was shared with teachers, parents, and grandparents and other Family members that we called: Enchantment and Ecology: Telling a different kind of Family History in an age of Climate Anticipation.
A few weeks later, we started to live into apocalypse in an entirely new way due to COVID-19 - eliciting an unraveling that we neither envisioned nor anticipated.
Humor and humility were necessary to acknowledge - wow - we spent a lot of time “anticipating” in the preceding months, envisioning half a dozen ways that the infrastructure around us could and would break down, but none of them looked like this - a global pandemic that would uproot our abilities to physically gather in traditional forms of community. What wisdom is there to be found there?
In her essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Octavia Butler says “Count on the surprises.” In “Hope in the Dark” Rebeca Solnit defines hope, in part, as maintaining the capacity to be surprised. As our own “community of anticipation” thought together about how to draw on both systems analysis and dream-time thinking in this moment, these calls to keep space for the unimaginable, the inherently unpredictable, felt profound.
There are many threads to this experience that we continue to explore - the shifting meaning of masks, the new conversations that poured forth with Robin as ecstatic movements for racial justice blossomed around us, the new visions of mutual aid in the midst of chronic and ongoing disaster, both the power and vulnerability of systems seeking to maintain the status quo.
In this piece we will focus on one strand: going deeper into water.
Before Covid, we reflected on how to cultivate and enchant our relationships with the non-human world. During that time I traveled to Colorado to visit the silver mines an ancestor had run, and went up and down the coast of New England thinking about where the land and ocean meet.
Quarantine shifted and focused that attention dramatically - from expansive movement to a different kind of relationship building - returning again and again to the same places.
The sense of the enchanted - that which gives access to understanding non-human presence and agency, opening up a "third thing" that is more than the sum of material parts - felt very real and near.
The past and future stories of Boston, which have been so integral to my family’s history, are in many ways the history of water and land tumbling over each other like two jousting friends tumbling down a hill. The great tracts of sea and wetlands filled in with gravel to make the Back Bay of Boston, providing more living room for the growing population of European settlers.
The four towns in Western Massachusetts that are now submerged under a mile of water flooded to make the Quabbin reservoir that now runs to the tap in our house in Jamaica Plain. And as Elizabeth Rush describes in her book “Rising,” business as usual means in 100 years nearly all of Boston may be underwater. Those tracks my ancestors and their companions filled in will, most likely over my son’s lifetime, be themselves re-claimed by the sea.
Perhaps in better understanding how the water and land and people have shifted in the past, he will better be able to work with how the water and the land and its people will come to shift in the future.
When I took Robin to his first climate strike, we made a sign with one of my favorite mantras of this movement: “The Seas Are Rising and So Are We.” The oceans will continue to rise and while we rise too, at some point we will also submerge.
I wonder if, when we do so, we may encounter some of our long-lost allies and relatives - human and non-human.
Covid made it easy to explain society unravelling. Robin’s former structure of preschool and play dates and time with Grandma unravelled in a few weeks. And I found that my relationship with some local long-last allies did not have to wait until Boston was underwater: the Pandemic’s Apocalypse did that for me.
In a moment when we were required to distance ourselves from other humans and the human-built environment, those primary relationships shifted to the non-human. I saw what it was like for trees to become grandparents, stones become playgrounds, streams become beloveds.
Robin spent hours co-creating a story with the smooth face of a boulder near our house.
Meanwhile, someone in our local parenting group posted a picture of a bird's nest built in the crook of a playground slide - a place where, at any other time, the rush of children would have made a bird's resting there impossible.
In talking with Sara Jolena and our anticipation group, I heard reflected back to me that this was not surprising. “In a time of upheaval, you needed to resource yourself, to go into that enchantment. In order to survive a pandemic in many ways created by the human world, when everything is shaken and uncertain, you needed to go deeper into strengthening your relationship to that non-human world - the pond that doesn’t move, the trees that don’t move. Or rather, that move at the speed they have always moved.”
The trees became friends, and Robin kept entering these majestic creatures. I keep wondering what enchantment the part to him.
I returned again and again to the stream I have always loved with a funny kind of erotic urgency.
Later, in the hotter days of summer, I went through a period of spontaneously submerging (fully clothed) in several of the bodies of water in my neighborhood where we typically only walk by the shore. A very minor transgression perhaps, but one that felt significant - a small boundary crossed that seemed a nod to the feelings of lawlessness that was in the air.
One of the sacred bodies of water in our neighborhood is the Pond, where swimming is discouraged. I did some research and learned for the first time that one of the reasons for this is that the pond is an unusual kettle-hole formation, formed by a glacier, and deceptively deep. That swimmers had a habit of getting caught by surprise by a staggering, underwater drop that happens only a few feet from shore. I thought about those themes of “deep calling to deep” that started out that first family story with the stars in the water.
I had these experiences in the spring and summer, but it was in those twilight days when autumn turns to winter that these images came tumbling out.
What would this place be like underwater?
In the weirdness of liminal time
So many boundaries reconfigured
Watching climate legislation disappear
It seemed suddenly not strange
This whole place underwater.
