As climate, social, and political crises escalate, one source of guidance becomes essential to our continued optimism and activism: a Numinous Story. Numinosity describes the direct experience of a spiritual dimension that is sparked by an apparently ordinary place, person, idea, song, or any work of art. A Numinous Story weaves its readers and listeners into a coherent whole that heals, temporarily, the brokenness pressing in on us when we are aware of more than our own small concerns. The more Numinous Stories we read and hear, the more optimistic, engaged, and committed to creating positive change we become.
Numinosity is not a universal experience. Some visitors to the Holy Wells of the world feel nothing remarkable and come away disappointed. Others find this holiness on a hike through a forest or in a photograph of a Redwood tree. Some feel this Grace in every bath and sip of water. Numinosity infuses ordinary life with the mystical dimension that makes all of life sacred and every place on this Earth a Homecoming.
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu, is, for many of us alive in these terrifying times, a numinous story. It meanders through our consciousness with the enlightening science of fresh-water lakes and rivers and streams, sometimes heavy with sediment and toxicity, sometimes fast flowing and cleansing, sometimes terrifying with truths smacking us down with the force of a tidal bore. Its characters are story tellers and story receivers, and despite their diverse natures, all the stories they tell reveal the many threats to our source of life on Earth – our water.
Nina Munteanu’s novel structure is perfect for the weaving of human scientific and mystical relationships with water. It’s initial and final sections create a frame for the inner story of bitterness, despair, self-serving behaviours, and corporate rapaciousness described by a professional scientist, a limnologist named Lynna. In the outer story we meet Kyo and Nam, Kyo’s mentor, as well as Ho, a librarian and keeper of a remnant of rare books. These characters exist on the other side of a mysterious cataclysm, the causes of which are the novel’s key themes.
Kyo, a small, four-armed blue being whose story begins and ends the novel, introduces us to the characters who form the larger diary section framed by the opening Library section and final Seed Ship section. Kyo makes glancing references to Una, mother of Lynna, and Lynna, mother of Hilde. Only Lynna is fully realized through her own perceptions and thoughts, these expressed in diary entries beginning in the spring of 2045 and ending in the late fall of 2066. Her diary, taking up 250 pages of this 303-page novel, provides the chronological spine connecting our past and present to a possible future that is not the one most humans want to think about, let alone welcome.
From Lynna’s diary, we learn that her mother, Una, was a child of nature alive to the beauty of the natural world. Born in 1969, Una is like the sixties and seventies Flower Children who danced, sang, dropped out, and committed to peace and social-justice causes. A non-traditionalist, Una lived her love of the world, repairing what she could in her role as Jill of all Trades when she needed to earn money. Between times, she introduced her daughter Lynna to the harmonies humans felt blessed to live among during those radical, community building times. Lynna, her diary reveals, is very different from her mother.
A Diary in the Age of Water is best sipped and savoured rather than gulped. Gulping will lead to choking for most non-scientist readers, and this book deserves to be experienced as it is written, in slow, undulating, revelatory waves. Each diary entry offers a rich store of scientific information that provides metaphors for life in our technologically skewed age. One vivid example is from the December 21, 2064 entry on the parasitoid, “an organism that spends a significant portion of its life history attached to or within a single host organism, in a relationship where the host is ultimately killed.” In the entry immediately before this one, Munteanu has Lynna express her feelings about The Giving Tree, a children’s book that suggests Earth is ours to use to death. Juxtaposed as the two entries are, we understand that Earth is the host, and we humans the parasites.
Like all complex stories, A Diary in the Age of Water requires patience, something our video-oriented age does not foster. The richest stories ask that we learn to hold many apparently divergent story threads at once. One of my fears as I read the diary was that the darkness of greed and short-sighted thinking and feeling would win out over that wondrous mystical relationship with the world that Una carried. While Una does her best to pass the experience of the sacred on to Lynna, Una’s spiritual influence is eclipsed by Lynna’s oppressive dependence on scientific knowledge to the exclusion of all else.
Through these characters, Nina Munteanu offers a warning for our times. Science is vitally important to our understanding of natural systems but science best serves us when it is balanced with an experience of the responsiveness of the natural world, a responsiveness that evokes our reverence and respect. Every culture honours the spiritual nature of the greater-than-human world, encoding its reverence in mythology, folktales, and wisdom traditions. – all keepers of numinous stories that transform our relationships with one another and the world. When we live honouring the sacred nature of all life, we become partners and co-creators. When we do not, we are highly dangerous parasites.
Martin Buber coined the phrase “I and Thou” to convey this sacred relationship. First Nations Peoples speak of “All my Relations” when speaking of the greater-than-human world. It is not Una’s daughter, Lynna, who carries this numinosity forward. It is Hilde, Una’s granddaughter, whose name means, significantly, Warrior Woman. How Kyo fits in to this lineage is one of the novel’s most unique speculations, one best discovered by reading the entire novel.
The arc of the novel is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s journey to mystical revelation in “Anthem.” After reminding us of human flaws, Cohen sings, “Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” Through his poetry, he affirms what Lynna discovers: knowledge without love cannot provide what we need to feel at home in our world.
This is the lesson Lynna, and we, must learn. She is called to hold the science of water firmly in her mind as her heart slowly opens to water’s responsiveness, water’s intelligence, water’s generosity, water’s love. It is a huge transformation for her, because science has been her safe place, her refuge. But knowing how something works is only the first part of the journey for those of us alive on this watery planet; we must all experience the why – the joy of unbreakable interconnections that make our lives meaningful.
This novel is rich with information about water’s evolutionary journeys; it also describes the horrors of human greed that directly impact our relationships with water. It is not an easy book, but it is an important one, especially for people ready to engage, to advocate, to stand against the corporate insanity currently destroying Earth’s delicate balances. It is a novel to learn from, and it is a novel to take forward into life as inspirational guide. Each of us is called upon to examine, not only our relationship with water, but with all Earth gifts.
If I could wave my magic wand, I would secure a place for this novel on high school and college reading lists, not only in Canada, but in the US, and all over the world. Young people of every culture have to meet the darkest possibilities to make wise life choices, and there is no better place to introduce these numinous possibilities than in safe learning spaces. Young people need places to grow beyond the previous generations’ ideas and concepts. They require safe places to learn to express themselves about personal fears and how these are triggered by the political volatility of these times. Perhaps most of all, young people require the freedom to read books that challenge them, that point not only to what is wrong with how we are conducting ourselves as planetary stewards of a unique planet, but that also dream of the transformations that occur when we relate to the greater-than-human world as Thou.
A Diary in the Age of Water. Nina Munteanu. Innana Publications, 2020.