The First Home Is a Watershed
Meditation at Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg on Watersheds, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common
This morning, I had the great honor of giving a meditation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Spartanburg on home, watersheds, and attention, along with some of my work with Edith Stein and religious contexts around these ideas. I wanted to share that here with you all. I started the video here at the beginning of my meditation, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing since the community and music is so moving!
The UU congregation here in Spartanburg is such an amazing community of people and thoughts and ideas, and I was really blown away by their hospitality, but also by some of their reflections and conversations that have resulted after service. A huge thanks to their ministers, Scott and Anne, who graciously welcomed me and worked with me over the last couple of weeks, as well as their whole staff, tech team, and especially their musician! I’ll be giving another meditation there next Sunday morning as well, which I’m very excited about.
Here’s the Meditation text:
The First Home Is a Watershed
Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg · August 16, 2026 Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common, part one of two
Thank you for the welcome, and thank you to Scott, Anne, Erin, and Kimberly for the invitation and for the care that went into this morning.
I want to start with a roof.
Rain falls on a roof in Spartanburg. It runs off the eave and hits the ground, and the ground is not level, because there isn’t any “level” ground here. The water crosses a yard where a black walnut has already been dropping fruit since July, works its way down through red clay and pine straw and whatever the children left out overnight, and eventually finds Fairforest Creek. Fairforest Creek gives it to the Pacolet. The Pacolet gives it to the Broad. The Broad carries it down through the middle of this state until it isn’t the Broad anymore after it combines with the Saluda around Columbia and becomes the Congaree, then becomes a different name when the water combines with the Wateree to form the Santee, and then the water becomes part of the Atlantic Ocean at the Santee Delta about 15 miles of a town we know as Georgetown (one of the oldest in South Carolina). I spent many years canoeing and kayaking in that same area where the water from our roof now combines with the Atlantic.
However, this movement isn’t due to any decision or intent. The water doesn’t deliberate. Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes. Before a home is a house, or a deed, or a hometown, or a country in its two hundred and fiftieth year, it is a slope down which the rain runs.
I didn’t grow up knowing that.
I grew up in Mullins, down in Marion County, in the flatwater country of the Pee Dee, where the land does not “slope” as it does here in Spartanburg. Water down there doesn’t run so much as stand and consider. It gathers in the ditch and stays. It backs up into the yard after a storm and takes its time about leaving. You can live in that area a long while and never once think about elevation (I never did, and now I’m obsessed with it), because the land doesn’t make you. It hides its intentions under all that patience.
Then I came to the Piedmont as a 17-year-old freshman at Wofford, and realized that this ground is not shy. It tilts. Every driveway is a small argument with gravity. You put a plastic pool out on a Spartanburg lawn in June, and within about four minutes you discover that your yard has a strong opinion about which way the world runs, as I relearn every summer. My children found that out before I did. They ran to the low end. Children always find the low end of the yard, because that’s where the water already is.
So the first thing I’d offer you this morning is a small and unglamorous claim. You live somewhere. That somewhere has a shape. And the shape has been doing something to you the whole time, whether or not you’ve been paying it any attention.
Most mornings before the children wake and the emails pile up, I take my coffee outside and sit under that black walnut before the day organizes itself into errands and to-do lists and the ordinary noise of a house with children in it. I’d like to tell you this is a practice. Mostly it’s just where the chair is. However, that has become a happy accident.
No-thing happens out there most mornings. That’s the point, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that was the point. A squirrel argues overhead about property it does not own. A cardinal couple cuts the yard on a diagonal. Ants keep their bright roads through the clay and often explore my weird human feet, usually in sandals. A walnut might fall with that small wooden knock, and then another one, and the sound is almost comic, like something knocking at a door that’s already open.
Given one such morning, this is nothing at all. Given six hundred of them, the tree becomes a tutor, theologian, philosopher, and friend.
What it’s been teaching me, slowly, is that attention is a discipline and not a mood. You can’t summon it by wanting it, any more than you can summon sleep by wanting it. I often think of the black walnut as Yoda teaching me the ways of the Force for this reason. You can only put yourself in its way, repeatedly, and wait. And the order of operations turns out to matter enormously. I go out there to learn what the world is saying before I ask it to mean something for me. When I get that backward, when I arrive already knowing what the morning is going to signify, the morning obliges me. It tells me exactly what I brought. That’s most of what goes wrong, in my experience, in ecology and in religion both.
Drew Lanham, who we heard from when the chalice was lit, says that wildness means living in the unknown, and that time has been teaching him to take the next question as an invitation to another quest. I’d put it this way. The black walnut has never once answered a question I asked it. It has, on a fair number of mornings, changed the question.
There’s a passage in Ecclesiastes from the Hebrew Bible in my tradition that I think is the most straightforward notion of hydrology in scripture. A generation goes, and a generation comes, Qoheleth (the writer) says, and the Earth stands forever. And then this, in the seventh verse: all the streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full; to the place where the streams go, there they return to go again.
The Hebrew word behind “streams” is נַחַל, naḥal, and it doesn’t mean a river with a steady year-round flow. It means an occasional water flow, a wadi, a bed that runs when the rains come and lies dry when they don’t. The later Greek translators picked that up exactly and rendered it as χείμαρρος, cheimarros, from χεῖμα, winter or storm weather, joined to the verb ῥέω, to flow. A winter-flow. A creek that keeps time with the sky.
That’s Lawson’s Fork or Fairforest Creek. Anyone who has walked it in a wet March and then again in a dry September knows it’s the same word.
And the word Qoheleth uses over and over for the whole business, the one my Bibles usually give as “vanity,” is הֶבֶל, hevel, which means vapor. Breath on a cold morning. Steam coming off a creek before seven a.m. It’s the most concrete word in the book, and we have spent centuries abstracting it into a complaint about the vain nature of the world. Qoheleth isn’t sighing at you. They’re telling you what things are made of. The water goes down to the sea, and the sea does not fill, and the water comes back to the place it started, and the mechanism by which it comes back is vapor. Hevel. The whole circuit runs on the thing we translate as meaninglessness.
I don’t think that’s despair. I think that’s a water cycle, observed accurately by somebody who was sitting still long enough to see it.
Here’s why all of that matters for the word “home.”
In the second creation account from those same Hebrew Scriptures, the human being is drawn up out of the ground. The Hebrew keeps the joke right at the surface with אָדָם, adam, out of אֲדָמָה, adamah. Earthling out of earth (which makes me think of David Bowie). Groundling out of ground. And then that creature is set in a garden (where else?) with two verbs attached to it, עָבַד and שָׁמַר, avad and shamar, to serve it and to keep it.
The pun doesn’t survive the trip into Greek. The human becomes ἄνθρωπος, a perfectly good general word for a person, and the ground flattens out into γῆ, Earth in the large sense, the whole planetary noun. And something goes missing in exactly that translation that influences our English translations and views on such things. Ἄνθρωπος could be from anywhere. Adam is from here, from this dirt, from soil you could name and hold.
To be from a place, in that older and stranger sense, isn’t a sentiment about a place, but a report about your material. You’re what this ground has been up to lately.
Ask me where I live, and I’ll give you a street over in Duncan Park. Ask the water, and it gives a different address entirely. It says: you are downstream of your neighbor to the north, and upstream of your neighbor to the south, and the rain that crossed your roof this morning is already on its way to somebody else’s well or on to the Atlantic.
Edith Stein finished a dissertation on empathy in 1916, years before she was killed by Nazi’s at Auschwitz / Berkenau on August 9, 1942. The German word at the center of it is Einfühlung, feeling-into. Her work starts somewhere more physical than you’d expect.
My own body, she says, is always the Nullpunkt der Orientierung, the zero point of orientation. The here around which every there arranges itself. I can’t step outside it. No vantage is available to me that isn’t from here. And she draws a distinction the English blurs: my body as Leib, the body I live from the inside, the one that aches and sweats and gets cold, and my body as Körper, a physical object among physical objects, the thing a doctor examines and a photograph shows.
The trouble with the zero point is that left alone it stops looking like a point of view at all. It just looks like the world. My arrangement of things becomes, silently, the arrangement of things.
What breaks that, for Stein, is the encounter with another. Another Leib, with its own zero point, its own here, from which I am a there. And what that encounter does is not to make me agree with anyone. It constitutes a common world. It reveals that a world was there all along that neither of us invented, and neither of us owns.
I’ve come to think a watershed does something very close to this, and does it to a person who might never sit still for the philosophical version.
Because a watershed will not let your yard be the zero point. The water leaves. It crosses the line where your deed or rent agreement stops. It arrives somewhere you have never been, and something drinks it, perhaps. And it came to you the same way, off a patch of ground you did not choose, from people you’ll never meet, having already been used. You are inside a common world whether or not you consented to one, and the county’s map, which is sometimes a real and useful document, is silent on this entirely. A map shows ownership as all maps do and were created to do. However, A slope shows relation. They’re describing the same acre, and they don’t agree.
We’re in the country’s two hundred and fiftieth year, and this congregation has been thinking about home all summer, so let me say only this much about the civic question and save the rest for next Sunday.
A deed is a claim about the past. It says how this came to you. A watershed is a claim about the present tense, continuously. It says who you’re implicated with as of right now, this morning, during this time of afternoon rain showers, and it doesn’t care at all what our impressive courthouse downtown has on file. Both are true now. But only one of them will be true in three hundred years.
Kimberly rippled the bowl earlier, and we sang about going down to the river to pray, and I’d point out that the river in that song isn’t a backdrop or scenery. You go down to it. It’s below you. It’s not really a metaphor the tradition invented. It’s just where water is.
I said there were two verbs in the garden. Serve it, and keep it. עָבַד and שָׁמַר. And shamar is my favorite for me because it shows up somewhere else you might recognize.
It’s in a blessing. The old priestly one, from Numbers:
“The Lord bless you and keep you. Same verb, shamar. The Greek even keeps the pairing, φυλάσσειν in the garden and φυλάξαι in the blessing, the same guarding in both places.
So, in my tradition, the word we use for what God does for us is the same word used for what we’re supposed to do for the ground. And I don’t believe that’s a coincidence of vocabulary. Instead, it’s a direct instruction about the direction of care, and about how badly we’ve been reading it all these years.
We have generally taken it to run one way. God keeps us, and we keep the garden, and we’re the hinge in the middle, the responsible party, the ones with the hands. That reading has produced a great deal of exhausted, guilty, well-intentioned environmentalism as well as corrupt capitalism, and I’ve practiced most of it myself.
But sit under one tree for a few years, and the arrangement starts to look different. That black walnut was here before we moved into our house. It has been shading my children through summers I was too busy to notice. It’s been holding a corner of this slope together, keeping the clay where it is, giving that patch of ground a reason not to leave for the creek. It drops what it drops. Something eats it. The ants keep their roads. And none of that has ever once required my attention, my approval, or my competence.
The ground has been keeping us all along. Not waiting to be kept. Keeping.
What changes when you see that isn’t the obligation. The obligation stands, and next Sunday we’ll talk about its harder, more specific, more expensive shape. What changes is where you’re standing when you take it up. You’re not arriving as the one who will now begin to care for a place that had been waiting for you. You’re waking up inside a keeping that has been going on the whole time, that made you the kind of creature capable of noticing it, and that will continue past you and past your deed and past this county and past this republic, which is younger than a good many trees.
Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes.
You are downstream of somebody. You are upstream of somebody. That is your first address; it was your address before you knew, and it will be your address after.
May we learn it well enough to live like it’s true.
Benediction
Go now into the ordinary week.
Take the coffee outside if you can. Let the yard tell you which way it runs.
Remember that the rain that crosses your roof is on its way to somebody’s well, and that you are, right now, inside a keeping older than your name for it.
The Lord bless you and keep you, as this ground has been keeping you all along.
Go in peace.
The Walnut Keeps Time in Spartanburg
At the edge of the yard in Spartanburg, where the black walnut leans into its own weather, morning arrives without asking to be believed.
The children have left their small offerings behind: a sun-faded ball in the clover, a plastic shovel near the fence, one damp sock folded by rain into the grass.
The tree receives them all with the old patience of wood, lifting nothing, refusing nothing, making a chapel from shade and green husk.
I sit beneath it with coffee gone cool and a book open in my lap, trying again to learn what the world says before I ask it to mean something.
The walnut does not hurry. It darkens its fruit slowly, lets squirrels argue overhead, lets ants keep their bright roads through the red clay.
Somewhere beyond the yard, traffic gathers itself toward school and work, toward errands, bells, the ordinary liturgies of another Carolina morning.
But here, under this rough crown, time is not a line so much as a widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain, the way a life grows inward before anyone sees what it has become.
I think of the cross, not polished and lifted high, but once a tree, once sap, once leaf, once a body drinking light from the same sun that warms my hands.
Maybe grace is like that, not arriving from elsewhere, but greening through what has already been given: this yard, this breath, these children growing louder, this marriage of errands and mercy, this Piedmont soil holding more memory than I know how to carry.
A walnut falls. Then another.
The sound is small, almost comic, a wooden knock against the day’s closed door.
Still, I hear it as invitation.
Pay attention, it says. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, stain, shadow, and prayer.