Fountain of Life

A lot of people agree with the Buddha. Life mostly sucks, they say. Now and then you may bump into an oasis of pleasure, but you can only stay there so long, and then it’s back to crossing the desert of suffering. Maybe heaven is on the other side, or maybe the world just drops off into nothingness. It doesn’t matter. For now you’re crossing the desert.

I may be naive, but it doesn’t really convince me. What about babies, and music, and sunlight, and waterfalls, and all the other things that put us in touch with the divine?

Still, the desert of suffering is pretty enormous, and a lot of people are dying of thirst as they struggle to cross it.

Maybe that’s why I am currently obsessed with Water. There’s this fountain near my apartment, the Keller Fountain. It’s outrageous — right in the middle of the city, surrounded on all four sides by multiple lanes of asphalt, is this mammoth, cascading, many-layered mega-waterfall. Its designer must have been possessed by bevy of naiads who wanted a place to play, because when the city turns on the fountain in the summer, they all come out of hiding to frolic in its sparkling waters, filling the air with their mirth.

Every day this summer I’ve been drawn there, toward the sound of splashing that reaches you before you can see where it’s coming from. When I get there, I creep into a shady spot under a pine tree and sit on the cool concrete, staring into the water coursing down its channel like liquid glass, full of glints of gold and green, to spread out and pour over ledges into wide, deep basins where children play on hot days. Above me the small pine holds stillness in its still branches…

All kinds of people come here to worship the water. At the edge of one of the pools, a young woman with gold in her hair smiles while her two elfin little boys tiptoe around the water, testing the air like puppies, delving into this reality that is so wonderful and new. Across the street a man with an orange flag leads a chain of bright-clad toddlers into the crosswalk toward this layer cake of tumbling waters. On the grass a dusty man sleeps, his legs marvelously locked in half-lotus, mouth half-open in dream. A cafeteria worker sits on a bench, gazing at the golden coal of her cigarette tip, and a troupe of Segways lands in front of her like a flock of chariot birds, pausing and wobbling slightly as their leader lectures them about how a Bulgarian woman named Angela dreamt this place up years ago…

Here in this oasis, the joy of the laughing, sweet water fills me to overflowing — that is why I cannot leave, but sit here entranced for hours. Somehow the singing, sweet flowing water gives me courage to be at peace, to stop disagreeing with the world.

I know there is suffering all around me, and I try to feel compassion, but it does not come easy. I am no Cinderella, to want to wear humanity’s glass slipper, which fits me perfectly but always hurts.

But of course I need to feel compassion, because I myself will certainly suffer again. It’s a problem of perspective. Peering out into the enormity of creation through the narrow peephole of my human existence, I want things to fit my tiny perspective, and when they don’t, which is often, I suffer. I’m too attached to my body and the bodies of my dear ones to allow the universe to just do as it will with them without protesting loud and long.

Usually I spend enormous energy disagreeing what already is. My children left, my flesh is sagging, the climate is changing, insanity is in power. That’s the way it is! I disagree with it, but it already is. I hate it, but when I sit by the water and let down my guard, trust sneaks up on me. Just for a moment, I stop disagreeing, and the wind goes out of the sails of my suffering.

And that’s a good thing. Peacefulness is possible. It isn’t an instant fix-all; it goes in fits and starts, wandering about like a toddler in the park, meandering, taking its time, getting lost. But things do get better if you keep at it. Sure, I still don’t get what I want a lot of the time, but the older I get, the less I care.

After all, when my body’s time is up, all the flourishes I have ever made to leave my mark on the world will vanish as if they never were. And for me, the world itself will vanish as if it never was. Everything will be like a moment’s array of bubbles on the surface of a river flowing toward the sea.

If that is so, why do I keep wanting to sing, to make poetry, to fill the world with beauty? Because life is a gift, and whether or not the gift seems flawed, the only thing to do is celebrate it.

So I celebrate the gift of being here with this faithful body and this clear awareness, the gift of this world full of remarkable people and other living things. I celebrate life and give thanks to wherever it came from, and wherever it is going. Because I know it’s going somewhere…

And when the inevitable dark wind sweeps through my life with its dictatorship of chaos and loss, then I hope I will remember the fountain of life: the delight of its rushing streamlets, the cool depths of its trembling pools, the kindness and generosity of its waters that never stop giving and giving. I hope I will remember to dip my hands and my whole body into its sweet, clear depths, to drink deep of its truth.

And then, in whatever new and unfamiliar place I wake up again, to begin the new day by giving thanks to the sun for rising, and by offering my hand with a smile and a kind word to all I meet.

- Trudi Lee Richards

Thanks to the City of Portland, Oregon, for commissioning the Keller Fountain Park, and to designer Angela Danadjieva for being inspired by the waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge.