To Soar - a little background

In 2005 we converted our small swimming pool, three feet at one end and six at the other, into a pond and gave the whole of it to the lilies and fish. A cement basin built for chlorine became a cement basin built for relationship. I have been watching water lilies, bullfrogs, dragonflies, and the other creatures the water called in ever since.

Over the past several weeks I have been thinking about water lilies as symbols of emotional recovery while making To Soar, an eight-by-eight-foot piece for the Nick Finnegan Counseling Center.

In it, sandhill cranes lift out of a wetland of lilies into open sky. The cranes carry their own recovery story: in the 1930s they were down to about 25 breeding pairs in Wisconsin, and today they number in the tens of thousands.

This post is about my relationship with water lilies. What the lilies have taught me is that we have their symbol backwards.

A lily's roots live in mud so starved of oxygen that most roots would suffocate there. The plant breathes for them. Young leaves, warmed by the sun, take in air and push it down through hollow channels in their stems to the rhizome buried in the sediment, and older leaves let it back out. Some of that oxygen seeps out of the roots into the surrounding mud and changes it.

The lily is not pure in spite of the muck. It is whole because of it. What looks like transcendence is a relationship running in both directions, from light to sediment and back.

This is what the lily offers anyone in recovery. We tend to imagine healing as rising above what hurt is and leaving the mud behind. The lily never leaves. It stays rooted in the darkest place it knows, and the decay held there is what feeds it: nitrogen, phosphorus, everything broken down and made available again.

Healing, read this way, is not escape. It is staying in relationship with the hard ground and sending breath down into it, season after season, until it can hold life.

In To Soar the cranes lift into the sky. The lilies stay where they are. Both are recovery.

To Soar will be auctioned at the center's fundraiser, then hang permanently on its central wall, where clients and counselors pass it every day. You can bid on naming rights.