Project Description

[This story was written for Ingathering Sunday, 2014 at the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship.  It was immediately followed by our Water Communion.]

My earliest memory is drifting up through the sky, heading further and further up.  I couldn’t see anyone else that looked like me, but I could somehow feel that the sky was full of things just like me.  As I kept rising, I started to gain a form that I could see – I was a single drop, but I was part of something greater.  Together with some other drops, we formed a family – a big and puffy family.  We floated around the sky for what seemed like an eternity, but eventually we started to fall back down to Earth.

Although the trip back down to the ground was pretty fun and I was surrounded by my friends and family, I still felt pretty lonely.  I missed that feeling of being a part of something greater than myself, and it was pretty fun floating around in the sky.  I felt like I was losing a part of myself as I fell toward the ground.

Before I knew it *splat*.

I hit the ground hard.  There was green stuff all around me, and slowly I started to sink down into the ground.  It was cold and dark and I was really scared.  Some of my friends that I fell to the ground with disappeared into different roots, and I felt alone in the darkness.

I kept falling and falling through the ground.  It was so dark I couldn’t see where I was going, and I thought I’d be stuck alone in the darkness forever.  I slammed up against something pretty hard, and I was stuck against a rock and a hard place for quite a long time.  It took time, oh so much time, but I made it past the rock.

And then I met other drops like me who had made it past the rock and the hard place.  And we started to come together.  This was a very exciting time for me – these were entirely different drops than I had met before, and they had some really interesting stories to tell!  One remembered being part of a plant that got eaten by a deer!  One remembered being part of a great storm and was blown all the way through a tree!  It was nice having so many different drops from different backgrounds come together.

Eventually our stream, that’s what we called ourselves, made it out of the darkness and into the light.

We saw all sorts of fun sights, and soon our stream joined with other streams.  We weren’t worried about losing each other because we found even more friends along the way.  We became more than just individual streams – we became a river.

Our river merged with more and more and soon we joined a big body of water one of the elder drops called the sea.

I had never felt more at home – there was a big community of all of us individual drops of water.  Some came from rivers, some came from the sky – drops continually joined us, and we celebrated their arrival.  Drops would also leave us, disappearing back up to the sky, and although we mourned their loss we knew they were continuing on their journey and wished them well.  I had made it through the dark times and arrived at my home.

In our story, the drops of water came from different streams to find a community together when they merged into a river, and later the sea.  When two sources of water merge, it’s impossible to tell which water came from which source – a true community is formed.  We all come from different places and different experiences, but when we unite as a community we are inseparable.