“I’m seeing every trunk, every branch. I’m seeing the connections between them. Then I see the leaves. I can see the slightly different colours, slightly different shapes, any damage that’s been done to them. As a naturalist, this is enormously beneficial. But sometimes all of this, the visual part of my world, is simply too much. It becomes utterly overwhelming. And that’s because I’m autistic.”
Chris Packham, Inside Our Autistic Minds, (episode 1, bbc iplayer, feb ‘23)
Last Sunday my son and I hiked up to a north facing peat bog to try and find a Sundew plant. (His idea). After delighting in the bounciness of sphagnum moss on sodden ground, and soaked to the skin from horizontal Yorkshire rain, we took shelter in a larch plantation to get changed, warm and fed. My son (8, autistic, home educated) has remarked a few times recently, looking skywards at rain falling through branches; “the water is getting randomised, mum! Every single leaf is changing the direction of the flow of raindrops!”
As we continued downhill, his hands no longer frozen thanks to dry clothes, we discussed how trees can act to Slow the Flow, first through the leaves, then directing the water into tree roots, slowing the runoff into the river and towns in the valley bottom, alleviating flood risk. We discussed how healthy bogs, like the bouncy sphagnum we’d just seen, act like a sponge, but degraded bogs increase the river’s peak during heavy rainfall, overwhelming the river’s capacity. We talked about the need to flatten the curve of the river’s peak, through water-catchment-wide natural flood alleviation.
I think some autistic people have a high sensitivity to and affinity with water. As a forest school leader I once worked with a seven year old who knew the depth at various points of every river and tributaries in the valley and how much it fluctuated.
I’ve had some kind of water initiation more than once.
One of them involved fairy rings, foraging, a standing stone, a beautiful stream, and an accidental offering of spring flowers to the headwaters. What you might imagine from a water initiation.
Three dimensional geometric liquid pattern formations started being in my dreams after that. I began to dream that I was water molecules shape shifting into exquisite formations. I often dream that I am a stream and that I am spinning down fluid Jack Frost style 3D waterfalls.
Everything you might expect from a stereotypical initiation. I’ll tell you about it shortly.
Unfortunately not all initiations are sweetness and light.
Firstly there’s this water initiation which is less blissful and required a strong stomach:
It was the first week of January this year. England was about to freeze hard for a week, closing the roads with snow and black ice. We were about to have a week of Jack Frost patterns, glimmering icicles, bitterly cold winds and that delicious crunchy snow that’s been frozen like icing.
I was in my kitchen when I heard an almighty gurgling. We have a downstairs toilet and suddenly a fountain a metre high and a metre wide was gushing out of it. Except this wasn’t water, it was pure sewage. In a matter of seconds it had covered my kitchen floor in several inches of liquid poo.
I managed to shut the kitchen door and yell at my partner to throw down towels and bedding from upstairs to put against the bottom of the door to slow the flow. Thankfully this quick reaction was to save my carpeted living room.
I’d noticed that water company employees were working in the field above us, 300 metres directly uphill.
My son and I ran up the fields to them. They looked really proud that they had unblocked the sewage pipe. I explained that the torrent of backed up sewage had arrived into our house. That my kitchen and utility floor was a brown lake four inches deep. They called for one of those trucks that suck poo out with a hose. Then carried on working.
It was still the Christmas holidays and I pay a sixteen year old to play with my son. Just that moment she turned up, looking immaculate and graceful in her false eyelashes and white trainers.
I couldn’t think where we could go. The stench in the house was gut wrenching. I’d already heaved in the garden.
We don’t drive. My autistic son won’t go in a cafe or pub or a softplay. My partner was on hold to the water company. My local friends were all at work.
Let’s go to the allotment. There’s a (compost) toilet. A fire pit. I grabbed the iPad and some coats.
It became apparent that it was too cold to sit without a fire. After a mild Christmas, the weather was this moment turning, a cold easterly blowing in. I checked in the shed on my plot and thanked myself that I’d left a lighter there.
The 16 year old managed to start a big fire with nothing but damp old nettle stems, a scrap of birch-bark and a sorry bit of bracken. The false eyelashes and white trainers are deceiving, this kid has skills. As a ten year old she had attended the forest school I used to lead every week. I’d trained her well and now, under duress, she could light a fire better than me.
The icy wind was blowing in strong. My partner was stood outside at home waiting for the water company. Hours later it was getting dark and they hadn’t showed up so we found a holiday cottage a couple of miles away. We said bye to our teenager and walked up a steep, frozen, unmade track to the accommodation, making jokes about poo-namis.
I became very grateful for food, clothes and shelter.
That weekend the snow fell hard then froze. We don’t have a vehicle but if we did we’d be snowed in. Thankfully we have boots, although the grips on mine had seen better days.
The water company sent their hose at midnight. It took over two weeks for the insurance to disinfect the house. My autistic son can’t handle me making phone calls, so my partner had to make the calls whilst attempting to work full time from “home”.
The water company closed ranks. They said it wasn’t their responsibility and that they wouldn’t help us. They didn’t even give out a direct number. My partner had to sit on hold for an hour each time we needed to deal with them. Thank god we have house insurance, but they were also so hard to get hold of, and refused to sign off accommodation for more than a couple of days at a time so we kept having to scrat around at midnight trying to find somewhere to go to the next day.
The country was in a deep freeze. Roads were shut. The snow froze solid. We changed accommodation on foot, crunching down steep frozen tracks with our backpacks.
The water company did what private corporations do the world over: violate homes with their carelessness and cost saving, then refuse to help and say it’s not their problem. From oil spills to mining companies, I realised Yorkshire Water were copying their tricks. Their “report” said it wasn’t their fault and therefore they had no responsibility to clean up. We would have to legally challenge them, they said.
After that my water dreams changed, no longer crystalline. I was the river, desperate for the sewage to stop flowing, but it kept coming in a continuous unstoppable flow. Or I was a fish being inundated with sewage, with no chance of it ending.
It was during our month in air bnb’s that the temporary ceasefire in Gaza happened, with harrowing footage of Palestinians returning to see their homes now rubble. Any desecration of my own living space paled in comparison to this, but my experience of having my home violated, combined with my hyper-empathic neurodiversity, left my heart broken for the Palestinian people.
My son is home educated and autistic. Our home is his safeplace and it was hard to be away, feeling at the mercy of incompetent insurance and water companies.
In the end my friends rallied round and five of us spent a long weekend sprucing the place up ahead of us returning home and I really do not know what I would have done without them. We returned home after a month. The place was a mess but at least sanitary.
Anyway, let's go back to a nicer story, I’m sure you’ve heard enough about sewage by now.
My first water initiation was a sunny April morning. I’d previously seen fairy rings in an ancient never ploughed meadow and it was St. George’s day. Not that I celebrate St. George’s day, I’m not patriotic, but I wondered if the rings were caused by the St George’s fungus, so I headed to the meadow to see if there were any fruiting bodies.
I didn’t find any mushrooms. I had a lie down in a fairy ring. I hadn’t planned to go on a big walk but before I knew it I was compelled to head uphill along the stream. The clough is an ancient packhorse trail and strewn with violets, rare round here. I found a paper bag in my pocket and foraged ribwort plantain, yarrow, and ground ivy.
I had an urge to reach the source of the stream, but my childcare time was running out, so I began to run steeply uphill. As I reached the moorland I got in the stream itself and followed it up where it emerged out of the rushes, the source. Here I drank the peaty water, splashed my face and neck. I thanked the stream and I heard an internal voice telling me that I was now a water apprentice, that this moment was my initiation.
Just above here is a standing stone, a medieval boundary marker although the stone itself was reused and is older and has ancient cup marks. I’d never noticed that it stands at the source of the stream before, and it’s four faces mark the cardinal points. I rested my back on her a moment, then realised the time. I needed to run to make it downhill on time. I rushed off, rusty toes unused to running, trying to remember how to be nimble over steep uneven heather. I was happy and exhilarated as the valley spread out below me.
My partner phoned me. He was out walking with our son. “I’ll meet you in the hawthorn meadow.” On arrival my son, he was six then, ran towards me, his hand outstretched and presented me with a branch of Rowan, its leaves freshly burst. “It’s a magic wand for you! It’s your prize!” he said, with a gorgeous grin.
I remember thinking, it’s my water initiation prize.
At home I excitedly unpacked my backpack, feeling pleased to make a cuppa with my spring foraging. I soon realised my paper bag of herbs wasn’t there.
I’d put it down by the source, up at the standing stone.
I was frustrated for a moment, but then I thought , it’s an offering to the stream.
I’d carried plants from the fairy rings at the bottom of the stream, gathering all along onto the barren moors, joining bottom to top. I suddenly had a vision of what the stream would be like if the sheep were fenced out, the rowans allowed to grow, the violets of the fairy ring field seeding at the stream source. I felt the fairy rings connected underground all the way to the top. They drew me uphill and I left an accidental offering there.
That was when the water dreams began and since then I have walked that path over and over with my son as he wants to find lizards and sundews on the moors. His autistic repetitive iteration takes us there over and over and the clough gifts us so much.
On Friday we spotted Tormentil and Cinquefoils, Great Scented Liverwort and Fountain Apple-Moss again. We feasted on wild cherries in the fairy-ring meadow, and spotted an ancient crab apple upstream in the hawthorn meadow, we’d never noticed. It was an adventure: we walked seven miles on the hottest and longest day of the year, accidentally disturbed a wasp-nest, had to run away, got stung six times, (my son only once,on his bum, as he is a much faster runner.) Spent an hour foraging bilberries to recover. It was bliss despite the stings. We came home hot and tired. Then he went straight out again to the river with his dad. He is thirsty for streams.
I hope to gift the stream more than my attention and a few yarrow leaves some day. I know there’s initiatives in the valley to revegetate upland streams and I hope this place may receive that somehow.
I have a different tributary to thank for this time to write: every evening my son and my partner hop on the electric bike and go to a (clean part of the) river to paddle. This summer routine gives me a blissful two hours of peace and quiet to recover from the antics of my non-stop, high energy son, who wants constant one to one attention.
Six months later we still have no flooring in the utility room, loo or hall. It’s like pulling teeth to get the insurance company to do things. I’m not sure my son can deal with having work people in the house either. I’m not sure how it’s ever going to get done.
But we have food, clothes and shelter and each other.
And I shall campaign, however I can, against the Water companies’ shameful treatment of British rivers. The river has my empathy now. This short film from Leave Curious is a good summary of what water companies are doing to the rivers.
At the allotment, I clean and empty the compost toilet. I have been loo monitor there for about four years now. I find something very tangible about turning shit into soil, and then spreading it onto the apple trees.
This of course is a symbolic act: not many poos in the valley are being done in the allotment toilet. But it helps to remind me to try to take responsibility for my own shit, both emotional and literal. I find it grounding. And it’s makes me feel useful beyond my nuclear family: my contribution to the local community. A small achievable task.
My son’s observation about the leaves “randomising” the rainfall makes me think about how every little thing can feel like a drop in the ocean but can change the direction of flow.
It can be overwhelming being neurodivergent: my brain often goes to the water of the whole valley, from source to sea, mentally pouring over the water table and water catchment, and it can be tiring to feel in so much detail.
My son is blessed and cursed with a similar brain. But streams settle him. They are the only place he will sit quietly, and you can see him watching every ripple pattern.
They also delight him, he’s an anxious thing, but clamboring about in streams has him squealing elated. Despite the shitty times, I feel lucky to live here.
Many neurodivergent people can feel the landscape deeply. As systems thinkers and pattern recognisers, we often notice in massive detail.
I hope society finds ways to heed the voices of the waters, inundated with shit when they could flow exquisite crystalline. As we are mostly water, let’s start treating ourselves better too.
When I was a forest school leader I was working in a school one day. An autistic boy and his assistant came into the forest school area adjacent to the school. He said happily “it looks different!” She replied “no it doesn’t, don’t be silly, it’s exactly the same as last time.”
Perhaps the leaves had burst, the grass grown, the flowers had opened, the angle of the light had changed. Who knows what he might have said if she’d replied “oh that’s interesting, what have you noticed?”
Can we start listening to the voices of autistic children? Because often the landscape speaks through them.
If we stop silencing them, they can teach us to open our senses.
I grew up in the Pennines of the north of England where people still practice well dressing. Patterns and pictures made of flower petals are placed around the village wells. If you’re curious to learn more about this tradition or would like some ideas for water offerings to try yourself, then
wrote a beautiful post on this recently.Not all initiations are sweetness and light; be warned that beholding the waters also means facing up to our shit.
Let’s get our act together and restore the rivers so they teem with life once more.
https://slowtheflow.net/
Thanks so much for the mention! Am horrified on your behalf about that water story 🙈 But agree that the right kind of water (streams, not sewage!) can be deeply settling and soothing for anxious and energetic minds. Has magic in it for sure.
Oh wow- what a horrible and hard experience... it's still amazes em how little accountability big corporations take (though it shouldn't). The Archers had a big sewerage leak storyline recently- also really brought it home.
Love the other water stories. Another autistic person here saying yes, an affinity with water. I'm planning to write about my time living on tidal waters in a houseboat, soon...