Groundwater painting by Glenn Wolff
By Jacob Wheeler
Art meets water.
Creative expression holds hands and swims with freshwater stewardship.
Breathtaking, life-sustaining water inspires art, and that art propels us to protect the Great Lakes.
The stillness, waves, clarity, and reflection of water give rise to poetry, music, paintings, dance, letters, and more. It’s a swirling, symbiotic, cyclical relationship that takes on many forms.
It’s poet, author, and avid standup paddleboarder Anne-Marie Oomen soliciting “Love Letters to the Lakes” from her community of writers across Michigan, and then presenting them in a live reading to the International Joint Commission, in hopes that heartfelt prose impacts public policy to protect the Great Lakes.
It’s “Mad Angler” poet Michael Delp and renowned cellist Crispin Campbell sitting together in an historic Michigan barn and performing an enchanting call and response about rivers flowing like veins through our bodies.
It’s artist Glenn Wolff painting a watershed, a town, a creek, and a bay, creating a tapestry to explain how groundwater beneath us is interconnected. It’s a dancer in a light blue chiffon dress delicately toeing the sand, always moving one step ahead of the lapping surf.
It’s Flint hip-hop artist and activist Amber Hasan rapping at Earthwork Harvest Gathering last month about the racism belying Flint’s lead water crisis. “Choppers keep flying ’round here / But people keep dyin’ I swear / I can’t drink the water, and I can’t afford the bills / If you’re sick of this s***, better pop another pill.” It’s music festival organizer and virtuoso Seth Bernard crooning a melodic ode to “Agua” in all its shapes, forms, and languages. “Clouds and rain and lakes it’s water / Mist and sleet and snow and vapor / Hail, hail it’s rising, falling / Flowing down down, ever lower / And up, up. Gathering together / Omnipresent life-maker / Two things bound together / Makes one life life force force giver”
It’s Higher Art Gallery in Traverse City inviting local artists to share water-inspired works for an “Artists for FLOW” showing that benefits our fight to protect that water. It’s an arts center in Glen Arbor inviting high school students next year to submit visual art that examines the question “who owns the water?”
“These waters are part of our DNA,” says FLOW executive director Liz Kirkwood. “We in the Great Lakes Basin are water people. The lakes, the rivers, and the groundwater inspire artists of every background. The water is what enlivens us and unites us.”
That is why FLOW is launching our “Art Meets Water” campaign this week highlighting the heart-felt creativity that inspires us to fight for our public waters and harness that for good. Check out our new “Art Meets Water” webpage to see Wolff’s groundwater tapestry, to read Oomen’s “Love Letters to the Lakes”, to watch Delp and Campbell perform “In Praise of Water,” and to learn more about the “Artists for FLOW” fundraiser at Higher Art Gallery, which continues until Nov. 5, with 10 percent of sales from the exhibit benefiting FLOW.
Embrace the water. Let it fill your creative spirit and fuel our shared fight for freshwater protection.
Letter to Lake Michigan
By Jacob Wheeler
Published in “Love Letters to the Lakes”
On these long, lazy September weekends when the forest hints of autumn but Lake Michigan clings to August, you’re reminded how water—and the myriad forms she takes—define your life as you float from chapter to chapter. She’s been with you on all the great journeys: from the brackish fjords of the old country, to the West African river that carries yam boats, to a volcanic lake in the Mayan highlands, even to the orifice-burning salt of the Dead Sea. She’s most forgiving here in these glacial freshwaters, the home to which you always return. She’s healing, too. Earlier this summer your friend scattered his mother’s ashes among these blue waves. She brings both joy and melancholy. If it’s true the eskimos have a hundred words for snow, perhaps we in Leelanau ought to have a hundred words for this lake…
Some seasons you frolic with her in new ways. You dance with her alone on night swims. When the lightning flashes, you dive into her waters, and then look up to see the sky alight. On a windless Thursday evening last you paddled across her glassy bay and chased a sailboat full of poets. You caught them and pirated their ship; they welcomed you with open arms, and prose, and beer and finger food. You learned, with some unease, that the hurricane ravaging the Carolinas had pushed this delightfully good weather north, to your benefit. (In another life, the odds will turn and you’ll be the one living on the low coast, battling tides and tropical storms— and they’ll have the inland serenity of the Great Lakes. So just enjoy it NOW, you reassure yourself!)
On the way back toward the harbor, when you’ve had a few drinks and your blood runs hot, her defense becomes your rally cry, your war call. Fight for her. Build a political manifesto around her. Turn candidates for office into foot soldiers who fight for her defense. Swear you’ll die for her. But also, live for her. Make love inside her depths. Write poetry with a stick along her shores. Do handstands and fall with abandon into her surf. Together with your child, document, day-by-day, how she (soon will) metamorphose into ice and back to water again. Gather wood and plan to stoke your hide in a lakeside sauna and take those screeching plunges into her frigid womb. Live to tell about it. Perhaps write a midnight poem about it. Above all, thank her every day.
