Welcome to Beloved Water Body!
When the life of someone you love is at stake, you stay with them.
I’ve been answering a call to listen to a lake for the last few years.
Great Salt Lake is my neighbor and also a rapidly vanishing inland sea, an essential refuge for over ten million migratory birds. I have lived on the land she made with her waves for over half a century.
Three years ago, I heard scientist Dr. Bonnie Baxter explain the impending threat of losing the lake due to human diversion, and like many, I was rattled. Around that time my mentor, Deena Metzger, encouraged me to begin listening to the sea herself. I turned my broken heart in the lake's direction.
The lake's voice then came in dreams and then a call to keep a vigil on the shoreline for forty days and nights in the winter of 2022, and again in the winter of 2023.
When the life of someone you love is at stake you stay with them.
The lake led me to borrow a camper and live on the water’s edge and then prompted me to call on others. She beckoned us and we came. Over a thousand people participated in the vigils on Antelope Island. We are now preparing for our third winter vigil on behalf of the Great Salt Lake, one that will begin on the Utah State Capitol steps on Tuesday, January 16th, and continue each day of the state legislative session.
I’ll share reflections here born of this listening, alongside lake-facing poems and practices. Additionally, I’ll provide writing prompts from the verses of Irreplaceable, a collective love letter to the water, coauthored by over four hundred lake friends. I’ll also report from behind the scenes of our upcoming vigil.
My devotion to the life of Great Salt Lake corresponds with other passions, some of which will make their way onto these pages. My beloved daughter, Beatrice Washburn, is a writer living in Tucson. She is also a transgender woman who grew up during an era of scant-to-nil resources for trans care. My focus on trans rights and my own queer identity led me to advocate for the sovereign rights of all bodies, including water bodies.
Beatrice and I both facilitate a community-held writing practice I founded in 2015 called River Writing. Since the pandemic, I have learned about permaculture by slowly transforming my small yard into an urban food forest. I’m drawn to whole systems thinking, geological time, and tracing watersheds. I’m endlessly curious about birds and their migrations. My canine companion Sophie, a brilliant border collie/ lab, is one of my primary teachers, especially in the realm of relationships. The term biocultural restoration describes what I am working towards. I pledge my allegiance to everything that is authentically expressive and leaning towards life.
The saga of Great Salt Lake reflects a worldwide phenomenon. Over one hundred saline seas across the earth are dying as waters are diverted. What is happening here may also be happening somewhere close enough to impact you and the life around you.
Waters are restored by ordinary, broken-hearted people who show up time and time again. Together, we can change the course of things. Everything we do matters.
Thank you for joining this conversation. Whoever you are, whatever your contours, identities, or origins—you have an inherent right to live, evolve, and flourish. Like Great Salt Lake, you have the right to be wholly yourself.
gosh i'm happy to be here. thank you always, dear Nan.
Sending waves of love and peace to sustain your voice in this great venture.