Discovering Pulse
Pulse
noun
1. a rhythmical throbbing of the arteries as blood is propelled through them, typically as felt in the wrists or neck.
2. a single vibration or short burst of sound, electric current, light, or other wave.
verb
1. throb rhythmically; pulsate.
THE VOICE OF PULSE
Pulse is usually invisible and often cannot be heard, yet it is the foundation of the living world.
The Oxford dictionary defines pulse as both a noun and a verb. Its meaning derives from its rhythmic throbbing and refers to both itself as a living force and to its effect. To have a pulse is to be alive. In all my writings about water, I never mention pulse; this is the first attempt to bring the reality of aliveness forward.
I have spent over 40 years learning Water–from the outside to inside of my body and from inside to outside. Yet in all my work thus far, I have never heard pulse mentioned, except by practitioners of Chinese medicine. Feeling pulse is the first thing they do. Nor was it ever present in the common ecological vocabulary. However, water and pulse are inseparable. Pulse is how we tell if a person is dead or alive.
I first learned that human pulses are a subtle electrical current in our bodies from Mae-Wan Ho’s book, The Rainbow and the Worm. She was researching how acupuncture works, and discovered that acupuncture taps into the pulse that is created by the rapid movement of the hydrogen molecule speedily zooming through our bodies. This movement creates a slight electrical current that acupuncture stimulates through all our watery cells. Ho’s research first alerted me to the pervasiveness of pulse. My deeper understanding of the significance of pulse evolved over time through many projects, collaborations, and, most importantly, listening.
Betsy Damon, Water Creating Heart
MY JOURNEY
My journey to know Water began in 1984. After a day of pouring and patting handmade paper on the stones in a dry riverbed, I looked up to a deep blue sky where the Milky Way was beginning to appear. Her stars reminded me of the stones in the riverbed. The Stars invited me to consider that everything is created by water and, I realized, that I actually know nothing about water. Within the next few heartbeats, I pledged my life to learning about Water.
Later that night I was told that the Indigenous People call the Milky Way “the river of stones.” The word Pulse, even with the stars animating the sky, did not yet show up in my mind.
While pursuing questions about Water, suddenly, I knew that it was not a noun, but a verb. I thought, “Of course, water creates.” Water is the action of creation. In English there is no such verbal construction. Several years later, I read Indigenous author and luminary Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, in which she describes “the grammar of animacy.” In her Indigenous language, the natural world is a verb: lakes, rivers, water, wind, sun are all verbs. The natural world can, and should, be re-verbed, and thus re-animated through language.
Water, the verb, became my teacher. As an artist, my work to reveal water’s true nature, as a verb, continued. My evolution never followed a straight line, but rather eddied and swirled with layers of meaning and connection as I journeyed to discover Water as a living force. Seven years later, in 1991, I founded the non-profit Keepers of the Waters, to continue to address the questions at the forefront of my curiosity, namely, how important is water quality and how does water create life?
I asked, “What can I do?” These were pioneering efforts as I began to gather artists, scientists and others to talk. Workshops during this time brought in scientists to present their information to the artists who would then brainstorm their ideas. In my approach, I did not decide what people should do. I invited and welcomed the opportunity to sit in community–to see what ideas and actions would come forward. In Grand Marais, a small town in Lake Superior, after learning about the declining health and depletive use of water, the group designed placemats about water to place in restaurants that invited customers to consider its use and importance. In Duluth, Minnesota, a theater group created a play, and musicians created concerts, with water as a theme. This was their vision. Nothing was too small. Nothing was too big.
At that time, and for many years after, as I sought to learn and to support those working to restore Earth’s living systems, I did not yet consider the incredible presence and importance of pulse. Pulse is the sound of the interconnected living system–breathing, whispering and talking. I have come to know that one of the most direct ways to engage others honestly with the living system is to listen to the waters.
Life and pulse are one, but we do not have a language that embraces both as one. Water is our teacher–but we do not have a language that recognizes her pulse so that we may learn to value and protect this life force as our own life force. Watery systems are large pulses, and this creates large disturbances as climate initiates changes. Pulses can be extremely large or very, very tiny and exist in every living thing. From this perspective we can begin to understand that the Earth is a living complex being with billions of pulses.
PULSE AND HEART–Pollution
With Water as my teacher, I began to observe and listen to her differently. I understood that water does not adapt to life–life adapts to water. Water that becomes very polluted struggles to pulse–the essential movement through which water cleans itself can scarcely move. This is similar to our hearts that will struggle when we fill ourselves with the wrong foods. Dead water, toxic water, is not life-sustaining.
Too often, engineering solutions compound problems and, increasingly, the nature of water that is essential for all life is imperceptibly altered by these actions. Rather than being ever-present, preserved and regenerative, water has become an object to be sold, possessed and bottled. Salamanders cannot pay a bill or live confined to a zoo cage. Pollution pervades, and Nature does not know which waters are safe and which are toxic.
Let’s ask: Why do we pour concrete on river banks? Why do we dam so aggressively? What are the impacts–advantages and disadvantages–of dams? Why channel water into pipes? Some of these steps are needed and helpful as they provide critical infrastructure. We fail to appreciate how our actions impact water. Our disconnection and separation from water prevents us from appreciating the restorative properties of water and its pulses which are the foundation of resilience.
We ask: Can we design systems where wastewater is processed by nature and reused? Can we daylight streams and design systems where water that falls on roads is returned to the Earth through swales and permeable materials, not captured in inadequate stormwater systems and dumped into the nearest river? Our standard practices need to change. Our codes and regulations should consider other solutions to how we use and treat water. This is increasingly important as a growing number of large cities have decaying infrastructures and are facing critical water shortages. It is essential that we face the very roots of this dilemma and the changes that must take place relationally and structurally to solve these pressing, life-threatening issues.
Often when a person holds a bird or rabbit, or a newborn child, the tenuous heartbeat of that new life invites a connected heart to respond. Our pulses hear and connect to their pulses. Can cities be filled with the Pulse of waters, fountains and other features? Could we develop spots where hearts can Pulse with the waters?
Betsy Damon, Water is Self-Regenerating
LIVING WATER GARDEN: Origin of Attention to Pulse
Everyone, when asked, has their own water story, a relationship to a water body that is formative to their being and, I will add, where they can feel their hearts connecting to the pulse of life. Unequivocally, my relationship to water changed when I went to China. “Living” water was part of Chinese understanding of the power of water. Pulse is integral to the culture–although often forgotten in the pressure to develop.
I had previously learned about the water of Sichuan and the great irrigation and flood control project of Dujianyan built in 256 BC that is still in use today. The city of Chengdu is an ancient city with 4,000 years of amazing history working with water and water projects. So, deep in my heart, I knew that going to China was important in my journey of water.
With no clear path yet on how I could begin, I spent my first two months in Chengdu inviting local artists to pay attention to the (Fu-Nan) Jing Jiang River. Everyone I met was proud of their water history and lamented how dirty the river has become. We needed to understand what had happened to the water quality and why. We invited engineers and scientists to help us understand. We learned that 54 species of fish once lived in these waters, but today not one of them could be found. In a quick 30 years the river had become dead. It was no longer a place where citizens could fish for their dinner.
With this knowledge, we began a series of meetings in which we brainstormed creative ways to focus public attention on their very dirty river. We interviewed older people who remembered the river as clean and full of life. This reality was central to the events and sculptures artists brought forward. Over 20 artistic events were presented during two weeks, designed to restore a consciousness of the need to care for the river. In one artistic performance designed to renew connection to this river that was once so clear that merchants could wash their precious silk, artists dipped clean silks into the water to illustrate the dark gray black stain of pollution. These and other events inspired hope to such an extent that the government was now interested in constructing a permanent public park to demonstrate how Nature cleans water.
I was invited to return to Chengdu in six months to present the idea for a park that would demonstrate how Nature cleans water. Within two weeks upon my return, we began designing a park on the largest piece of land located along the Jin Jiang River. I began to work with a team of engineers provided by the city’s river restoration group to design a seven-stage water cleaning system. The system would pump dirty water up to a settling pond, and from the settling pond the water was released to flow through vortex sculptures, called flowforms, into the cleaning ponds where specific plants cleaned the water. Finally, it would flow into the clean water area.
Flowforms are especially designed sculptures which reveal the pulse and increase the dynamics of the waters. These forms are carefully designed to facilitate a vortex motion of water pulsing as it automatically does in a healthy stream. All the waters are interconnected, flowing from one part to the next by gravity.
The flowform is a very precise design that works best when at least nine to fifteen bowls are used in one line. In the park we had to reduce the number of bowls in a row to six, but it was still effective. Children were fascinated to follow the flow of the water; fish loved to hang out where the waters were deposited from the flowforms into a pond.
I do not think it is a stretch to say that people love this park because their pulses and hearts connect with pulses that are revealed and integral to the aliveness in the water. Six weeks after the park opened we glimpsed a kingfisher diving into the ponds. Our smiles communicated our happiness that the dynamics of this park invited this species to explore.
Additionally, it generated excitement and learnings that continue to evolve, including the addition to the park of 10,000 year old ancient ferns, carefully brought from the base of Mount Emei. It is now a thriving micro ecosystem where many birds live. Here the water features are integrated to the whole. In this park, the plant life and basic waters remained healthy. The park could maintain itself regardless of the neglect it experiences from time to time.
The Living Water Garden in Chengdu China, which was completed in 1998, has since been described as “a city within a park.” The city is amazingly alive–trees and plants flourish. Once inside the park, it is hard to imagine that you are in a city of 16 million people. Water determined the design. The pulses, invisible, yet very present in the waters, the plants–the teeming life in the park is full of pulse.
We did not know at the time of the construction that this small park would initiate collaboration and connection with other parks along the river, and many years later lead to a plan to connect up the green places in the city. Just recently, when I visited Chengdu in April 2024, I learned about its influence on other parts of China where these ideas are being adopted to address their water problems. The Living Water Garden inspired many internationally and remains a model of how Nature-based solutions can take on some of our planet's big challenges.
Living Water Garden wetlands
LECTURING AND WORKSHOPS: Wetlands, Plants as Cleaning Systems
This one small gesture–the park–became a beacon of hope–a teacher that held a place for the next 25 years, while much of the world was seeking to dominate and control pieces of the Earth and her living systems. The forests, waters and lands suffered injustice after injustice under a destructive demand to extract and exploit. Yet, quietly, others were creating “living” designs, and, as pressure in our failing systems grew, some began to fight outright to save land and water resources.
Two aspects of the park stand out: first, the use of plants to clean water in constructed wetlands. Wetlands are the single greatest source of new life. Many engineers now turn to wetlands as part of how they manage waters. The park modeled the vital function of diversity and interspecies collaboration to clean our waters so that they can continue to sustain healthy life.
A second aspect was one of connectivity. In order for the park design to be an effective revitalization of water, all parts needed to work together. As the waters flow through the different parts, each part adds something to the revitalization of the water. If these parts are not connected, the toxins will bioaccumulate in each section, and eventually the whole will die.
When I returned to the United States after my work on The Living Water Garden, as I lectured and attended meetings, and was at times asked to design for the waters of that specific place, I realized it was often an empty exercise. Too often, people did not see the urgency of refocusing attention away from control and construction and back to restoration and reparation. Even when they did get it, they often felt paralyzed or simply did not want to do anything about it. This was depleting me.
By 2016, I could not find a way to move forward. It took two broken femurs and a kneecap to move me into total pause. I knew I needed to stop trying so hard, and to sit and rest. During this time I wrote a book, Water Talks, based on my experiences to empower communities to know, restore and preserve their waters. This gave me time to search into my life and to reflect on my journey.
I recognized that, in my life, I have given birth to two beautiful children; I have taught at the first feminist art studio at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and I have traveled widely to share my art and my water story. As I journeyed further back, I remembered how, in 1974, I was introduced to deep listening by Pauline Oliveras, an avant-garde musician. I participated in workshops and performances with her. I relived times when, as a child, I was always inviting friends to come to play in the creek. I loved when my father and I would walk up hills and valleys to the headwaters of a stream–subtly introducing me to the source of this water. There, we often found a live meadow filled with flowers and insects.
In 1997, on weekends in Chengdu, friends and colleagues would take me to a village up a long gorge where a stream ran swiftly, carving the rocks. I would sit on the rock ledge watching for hours. Villagers would invite me to their homes where we walked and talked about what they could do, and if, in my eyes, their ideas were okay. Once I danced the jitterbug with students on the edge of the Yangtze River.
I quietly asked myself, what is next? I began to sense that the pulse in my body needed to find and align with the pulses in the waters. Pulse is the living force of water. However, in the daily grind of life, I had put that knowing aside. Pulse–to be with Water on both literal and metaphysical levels, rather than from an external position of trying to stop exploitation or domination–was the key. So, I committed to begin more deep listening of the waters.
I felt miraculously affirmed at the first public listening event I hosted, in 2023, in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. I worried that this would be another day of sitting alone by the water.…It was an event with no motion, no visible entertainment in New York City! Impossible–no one will come, I thought. It was a stormy day and we expected thunderstorms. I was quite nervous. However, about twenty people gathered. We sat in a circle for an hour, turning our attention to the river which was about 100 feet away and down a slope. We had virtual participation as well, positioning our phones over the water to send sounds of the water to listeners in Virginia. The sender and receiver both reported experiencing an electrical current running up their legs into their bodies. It was a powerful experience.
The fast-flowing East River sent a very clear message to us–although it was terribly polluted and couldn’t be used for swimming, the river message was strong and clear. It seemed to come alive as we sat with it. We heard, “I have been here over eleven million years; I will continue. I am so happy you are here listening to me–take care of yourself, because you in your ignorance are hurting yourselves more than me.”
We often meet these experiences with skepticism. I had been walking in skepticism for so many years. After this event, I felt lightheaded, yet deeply relaxed. I was not alone. Others heard the same message; many were very surprised at their experiences, especially the energy received and the way it occupied their hearts so deeply.
Most recently, in April 2024, I was invited back to China for an exhibition. I asked the curator if I could lead a performance event to listen to a tributary of the Yangtze River. As we sat in silence listening to life around us, the river spoke up.…A fish jumped, the frogs and birds sang louder. The sitting people grew ever more still and peaceful. When I opened my eyes and saw the faces of those who had sat down to listen, their faces contained amazement at their experiences. The sounds they heard created a sense that the species had joined with them.
I was longing to get closer to the Yangtze. This river has carved its course through cliffs, and it was very hard to reach her. However, with help from the others, I was able to descend almost 100 steep steps to the rocks. Here we created acupuncture for the river by placing stones upright in its pools.
I've come to understand that the goal must be to build a community that strives to nourish every component of the living system upon which we depend. Amidst wars and climate crises, we are too heartbroken to think clearly, and to reach for connection seems futile. And yet, I have not found a better guide to action than to find and listen to the Pulse of waters, the source of life.
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN HEART AND PULSE
In the consciousness of my heart and in my search for hope and affirmation, my deepest belief is that Nature is far more creative than we know–she will respond to the thousands of ways we have ignored and disrespected her.
Our relationship, as urban dwellers, to Nature can be distant and disconnected. This makes us feel more out of control and fearful of natural elements. In these disruptive times, with too much focus on the digital and artificial, we lose syncopation with the pulses of life. Our biology has fallen out of sync with the pulse of the natural rhythms.
There are lessons we can learn from cultures that see themselves as part of Nature.
In Mexico, a living system restoration is underway guided by deep listening with local elders who spoke about a drought resistant grain that had grown in the Tehuacan Valley centuries ago: amaranth.The Indigenous farmers began to replace the climatologically ill-fitted wheat crops with the native grain amaranth, which their ancestors had tended hundreds of years ago. The grain flourished and was easily adapted into the local culture because a biocultural memory had been activated. The project was a success because it embraced Indigenous knowledge as a foundation and responded to Indigenous people’s embrace of that knowledge.
Similarly, the Khasi people of the northwestern Indian state of Meghalaya have been Indigenous caretakers in the critical reforestation and conservation of their rainforest. Reinvigorating the traditional ecological practice of Bun cultivation, the Khasi have modified their terraced hillside agricultural practices to best fit both the land and current needs into a sustainable restoration model. In China, traditional earth-friendly agricultural practices have been reintegrated in order to restore rice paddies in places such as Yunhe County. There, fish provide the growing rice with both pest control and fertilizer while circumventing the need for harmful pesticides and other chemical additives.
In each of these examples, local populations observed and listened to the living systems. They then applied solutions based within a complex, natural system that accounted for the interconnections of land, species, climate, and, critically, people.
I am now at the point in my work and my life of knowing our relationship to Water needs to connect to our relationship to consciousness of pulse. Revealing workable solutions for revitalizing waters has not yet been adopted by many.
The most direct route to cleaning up this complex living system is to start with water. Water always seeks to be its highest self, to clean itself, in what has been discovered as its quantum coherence. It does this with movement and contact with plants, dirt and stones. How surprised we are to consider how microbes are able to eat plastic and oil. We need to pay attention to the extraordinary power of the enormously complex interdependent living system we inhabit.
In writing this essay, in coalescing my own experiences over the past 40 years, I asked how I could reveal the concept of pulse, so invisible and non-articulated in my culture. I asked myself why has the word pulse virtually disappeared from the concept of aliveness. I'm seeking to reveal passion and a love of life to enable others to understand how deeply we are dependent on the living system. It is time for all of us to step into the web, where we belong with each other, side by side with trees, plants, insects, birds–this pulsing aliveness. Their voices can be heard if we stop to listen.
When a person dies, we listen for their pulse–it is gone. When I gave birth to new life, I felt that moment when life and death are both present, and so it is in the living world. Many species are going and others are coming into form. We feel both. As species disappear or move away, listen carefully, and you will hear the new ones arriving.
Two weeks ago, I spoke on a panel addressing the waters of Naples, Italy. There were tensions and frustrations around different approaches to saving water systems or replacing old ones with new ones, which communities get water and how. During this session, I described the importance of listening to pulse and its relation to the challenges we are facing. I stressed that all of us there needed to not advocate for one solution or another. Together we could strive to uncover a unified cultural consciousness to guide the solution.
My presentation summed up with a reference to an ancient Chinese text on the beginnings of culture. It begins by describing “the way:” “There is no way of love, love is water.” The leader of this ten-day workshop, Kyong Park, immediately lit up. He added that whatever we do, wherever we are, for whatever situation we are designing, Water has to give life to everything. When it does not, we have the wrong solution.
Lao Tze, one of China's great early philosophers, says that a wise leader solves the problems of water first.
I agree. When we listen to the water, when we hear the waters pulse, we will know what is right. We live with family, friends, community–in and fully dependent upon the living world. Amazingly, we are all pulsing together in this vast creative space called the living system on Earth.
