Clay Lenses

On embracing the flux of flow

Nothing in the world

is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,

nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;

the gentle overcomes the rigid.

Everyone knows this is true,

but few can put it into practice.

-Tao Te Ching, Verse 78

Earlier this week, the individual who has been stalking me was found not guilty in the first of multiple trials. It was the verdict prosecutors had anticipated: the state’s burden to prove criminal intent is an extraordinarily high one in these types of cases, and the presumption of innocence is a daunting one as well (as it rightly should be).

In my role as a journalist, I’ve covered enough violent crime and wrongful conviction cases to know that justice often isn’t served in a courtroom. But on that day, I also learned firsthand what it feels like to watch twelve strangers side with your assailant, and the emotional impact of that experience was devastating.

A large part of the subsequent emotional fallout I’ve experienced stems from the realization that there is absolutely nothing I can do about any of it. And that’s not a state of affairs for which I’ve ever had much aptitude. Typically, when facing defeat or when I feel like a system has failed, my response is to double down: to fight harder, to work better.  But what happens when that just isn’t an option? When there’s nothing you can do to change a decision, to reverse a course of events, to affect an outcome you very much desire?

In the couple of days since the trial, I’ve been thinking about those questions quite a lot. And all that mulling and reflecting eventually took me back to my own one experience serving on a jury. During the first marathon day of jury selection, the woman seated next to me and I became friendly. Perhaps a decade older than I, she had all the crunchy groundedness I love about the people who live in our little midcoast town. A landscape horticulturist by training, she also worked as a cranial sacral healer, someone skilled at moving energy in the body and restoring natural rhythm.

Most of the specifics of our conversation have long faded, but one very sage thing she said has always stuck with me:

Flow with the go, she said, inverting that old chestnut and making it both fresh and especially astute.

I’ve gone back to her philosophy many times since that day in the courthouse. For a lot of us, the idea of letting the currents take us wherever they may can cause a little apprehension, if not full-on panic. But I’m also coming to see the wisdom in doing so and the opportunities it might create if we let it.

A week or so before the trial, I stopped by my friend Margot’s house to drop off a pot I’d made for her.  A talented cartographer, she’d noticed an unusual amount of runoff on the western shore of a nearby island, and had just returned from investigating firsthand.

“There was just so much water pouring out of a low-level landscape that it beckoned questions,” Margot told me as we stood in her kitchen that evening. “And look at this.”

She walked over to her refrigerator and pulled out a Ziploc bag filled with wild clay that she’d brought back for me. Inside, was a hunk of perfectly plastic clay as pure as any I’d ever seen. It coiled beautifully, and wouldn’t even need to be processed before becoming a bowl or sculpture. Best of all, Margot explained, massive deposits of that same clay were lying in plain sight, thanks to the extraordinary run off and erosion she’d first noticed in her research.  

After several months and multiple (often only moderately successful) attempts to dig wild clay in river mouths around our area, I knew what a gift this was, and I very much wanted to see the formation for myself. So the next day I took a large backpack, a garden trowel, and the GPS pin Margot had sent identifying the spot. Good thing she did, because I would have walked right past it otherwise.

At first glance, the clay just seemed like an unremarkable section of the intertidal zone, what might be mistaken for a large deposit of granite or shale.

It is, I’ve since learned, what scientists call a lens, which is to say a deposit bounded by converging, curved surfaces thick in the middle and thin at the edges, much like a convex lens. Geologists theorize that clay lenses like this one were left by hydrological chutes, riparian channels that emerged as water flowed over gravel bars, taking loose sediment along with it and leaving vein-like troughs. During high flow events, the river submerges these otherwise exposed gravel bars and their chutes. As it does, the velocity of the current drops dramatically, just as a rising sea floor impacts and intensifies wave action. As the river current slows, it allows clay and other fine-grained sediment to settle into a chute, eventually filling it (and thus creating those telltale lens shapes).

Once, the high flow event slows even further, coarser material becomes deposited as well, covering the lens for centuries or even eons and returning the bar to view.

It takes a particularly high water event to re-expose the clay lenses. As it happens, we’ve experienced multiple so-called storms of the century the past two seasons, and all of their wave and runoff action were enough for this lens to finally reemerge. I see a real elegance in that process and the fact that the same conditions that first formed the clay deposit are those that reveal it to us all these millennia later.

In his posthumously published journal collection, Round River, the great nature writer Aldo Leopold mused on an eponymous river  in Wisconsin that literally flows back into itself. In that flow, Leopold saw a metaphor for all of ecology, one in which energy flows from soil to plants to animals and back again into the soil. It’s very much the same idea as that first articulated by the grave digger in Hamlet, whose soliloquy traces how a king ends up a worm in the belly of a fish.

And what, really, is either notion if not the pure embodiment of flowing with the go?

The same, I think, can be said for the catastrophic forces that exposed my new source of wild clay.

We tend to think of the dramatic erosion required to expose a clay lens as destructive and damaging. But riparian ecologists are beginning to theorize otherwise. Turns out, the kind of violent bank erosion Margot and I witnessed actually benefits river ecosystems in all kinds of ways, from creating vibrant riparian habitat to establishing beneficial channel patterns and new gravel or sand bars, that in turn create new lenses (and protected breeding grounds for many bird species). Awareness of these benefits has radically changed how geological surveys and the Army Corps of Engineers respond to erosion: no longer is bank stabilization the ideal of landscape restoration. Instead, steep banks are increasingly allowed to collapse and disappear, making way for newer, more productive ecological habitat. Typically, the only creatures inconvenienced by all this sturm and drang are the humans residing nearby. And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we got over ourselves where that inconvenience is concerned.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously opined that we cannot step in the same river twice. Most contemporary scholars interpret that as Heraclitus’s assertion that the only constancy of some material realities is their nature to change: that rather than destroying consistency, flux actually preserves it.

Panta rhei, Heraclitus insists: everything flows. To accept that statement as truth, we must also accept what he terms the unity of opposites:

Cold eventually becomes warm; warm, cold. Wet becomes dry, and dry wet. It is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre . . . Whole and part, agreement and disagreement, accordant and discordant; from all comes one, and from one all.

The tricky bit, of course, is knowing what to do when we are confronted by this opposition, particularly when it arrives in the form of discord and disagreement. I continue to believe there are plenty of times when we should toil to resolve or overcome it. There is so much worth fighting for in this world, whether that’s a concept as lofty as justice or something much closer to home, like a cherished friendship. What I’m beginning to realize, though, is that there are times when paddling against the current isn’t just futile and exhausting; it can also be damaging. There are times, I think, when the only real course is to let that river take whatever it wants. And I want to believe there’s a kind of grace that comes from allowing that river to surge over us, sweeping away our banks and depositing mud in their place. The gift, I think, comes when we learn to embrace what that experience has to teach. And if we’re very lucky, we might also discover new life in its wake, not to mention a little insight into both the power of ecology and the eternal return of the cosmos.

-Kate

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