Mysterious Hope for a Troubled Planet is the eighth in a series of essays on the Spirit of Water by the Water Stewards II. Published in the Marquette Monthly April, 2025.
– Jon Magnuson
If there is magic to be found in the world, you will find it in water.
-Loren Eiseley
Years ago, during a visit to the Marquette community, I visited the father of a high school friend who lived in a small home on Spruce Street. The day before, he’d returned from the hospital following major surgery. He was living alone. He was frail. His family was of modest financial means.
We sat together staring out the backyard window into the melting snow that April afternoon. I remember him saying, “This is really all I need. To sit here watching the earth come alive again. To be drinking from this glass, filled with water.”
Thanks to sophisticated research over recent decades, we are discovering more and more fascinating, spell-binding lessons about water. We need to keep reminding ourselves that we have difficulty grasping what we cannot see. Scientists and artists can help us. In 1972, astronauts on Apollo 17 returned with the first photographs of earth taken from a distance of tens of thousands of miles. Those images soon became known around the world as the “blue marble.” What the astronauts saw was a slowly spinning planet covered with clouds, formed from condensation rising from seas and forests. Those clouds were floating gently over what Paul Winter in lyrics for his composition Earth Mass called “the vast blue-green hills of earth.”
What wasn’t recognized by many at that time was that our earth’s molecules of water with their remarkable, ever-shifting blue colors are actually finite. In other words, water changes form between mist (vapor), solid (ice), and liquid but this essential element remains unchanged. It’s the same water that was here at the creation of the planet six billion years ago. What appears to come and go actually doesn’t. Water is simply recycled in the dynamics of the earth’s many interfacing geophysical systems. What we now know is that H2O is the essential building block for plants and animals, for all living things. It marks our earth as unique in the solar system as we know it. Water is life. Life is water. W. H. Auden may have said it best. “Thousands have lived their lives without love. Not one without water.”
Over the last year, members of the interfaith community launched an initiative to understand, celebrate, and protect sources of drinking water in the Great Lakes Basin. Efforts have included community forums addressing drinking water from a global perspective and the challenges of protecting our drinking water in region’s cities and rural communities. Coming soon is a public forum on the heated controversy about health and the challenge of adding fluoride to public sources of our local drinking water.
Two components of this collaborative project remain puzzling for many. But they are at the very heart of the 2024-25 Water Stewards Initiative.
The first is our ongoing planting of 1,000 small Northern white cedar trees by volunteers in community forests and public lands. Here’s the reason. Satellite and infrared imaging have taught us something. Forest biologists now confirm that each and every tree, with an average circumference of 10 inches in trunk size, releases though their foliage, 100 gallons of pure, clean water into the biosphere every 24 hours through a process of transpiration. Jeff Noble, a retired wild land fire-fighter, refers to the Initiative’s tree planting process as a gifting the earth. When these 1,000 trees mature, thousands of fountains of pure, clean drinking water will be released into the biosphere each and every day.
Second, this Initiative is assisting and supporting the maintenance of two village drinking water wells, one in Cambodia, the other in Tanzania. Less than 1 % of water on our planet is suitable for human consumption. The majority of it remains captured in our oceans, locked into arctic ice, and stored deep underground in aquifers. The lack of availability of good drinking water for millions of peoples around the world remains a crisis. Religious traditions at their best unceasingly keep inviting all of us to use what resources we may have to share with others.
The mystery of water reminds us we are all connected. Far from here, two wells in Asia and Africa will be providing health and hope to under-resourced communities. Here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the planting of trees is part of another kind of healing. Trees are more than harvestable commodities for profitable lumber industries. They are a part of the heart of a sacred cycle that offers us life and hope.
My friend’s father is long gone. But my memory of him, long ago, staring out a window one afternoon, holding a simple glass of water, resting in gratitude and grace, will remain with me forever. Perhaps, for some of you as well.
– Jon Magnuson
Jon is the Director of The Cedar Tree, a nonprofit organization in Northern Michigan that initiates projects and provides services in the areas of mental health, interfaith collaboration, and the environment.
