Being a puddle

when you do well in a huddle

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Pull up a comfy chair, for today we shall be exploring sadness and puddles.

Last week I touched on bad storms as a metaphor for grief and my mind drifted to my favourite word, nay, my favourite subject in the world: Puddles.

Not this puddle:

But puddles you stomp and plod about in in your Wellington Boots.

I want to do a deep dive into puddles boot first and explore how they too are a great metaphor for grief, longing, sadness and puddly moping.

But first we shall set the scene by exploring puddles as a whole.

The Cambridge Dictionary says:.

‘You have to step around the puddles in the street after a rain shower.’

I found a bloody good essay on puddles which confirms that stepping around puddles is direct assurance that you are alive:

In his essay ‘A Hanging’, George Orwell gives a typically direct account of an accused man being walked towards the scaffold with the empty noose awaiting his neck to fill it. The accused man changes his step – a seemingly mundane gesture – but Orwell sees something more in it:

“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”

Channelling Camus, Orwell notes the existential hinge of action (as much as inaction) as confirmation of existence, presence of mind as soul. The condemned man is exposed at the precipice of choice, at once trivial and poignant. Knowing he is about to die, the prisoner still affirms his presence of mind:

“his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles.”

EVEN ABOUT PUDDLES?! People really like to subvert the importance of puddles - but not me! First of all stepping in puddles makes me feel MORE alive.

Exhibit A:

Puddles have always felt quintessentially British storybook to me. Especially the storybooks of Shirley Hughes who has very good puddle content - even her twitter is the epitome of #puddlecore

Shirley Hughes @ShirleyHughes_

If it had been raining Alfie liked to go stamping about in mud and walking through puddles, splish, splash, SPLOSH! From Alfie’s Feet

Puddles are intrinsically linked to my childhood.

My childhood was also intrinsically linked with explorations of sadness.

As a child I ate sad stories up, and I enjoyed them most when they were in soft, gentle packaging because it felt easier to digest. Casper and E.T. both had incredibly devastating storylines. Let’s all cast our minds to the moment Casper tells Christina Ricci about how he went sledding, then it got late, it got dark, it got cold, and then he got sick… and then (spoiler alert) he dies:

But the aesthetics are so cozy, the ghost is sweet and round, and watching this film was a gentle space for me to explore sadness, death and grief before I encountered it in my own life.

I mean, is there anything more devastating than this puddle adjacent children’s content:

So what if that softness of children’s storytelling and the gentleness of puddles was applied to our adult experiences of grief as well. We’re all just ex-babies after all.

Water has always been associated with the subconscious.

The section on Lakes (an elevated puddle) in the Book of Symbols talks about it’s reflective surface as a mirror, distinguishing between our conscious and unconscious mind, and when one goes into that unconscious side of ourselves:

One takes a dive only to be trapped by surprisingly dense marsh and reed growth, and drowns entangled in the seemingly soft green grasses. The most body like of bodies of water - the scale of a lake can be encompassed by the human imagination, and lakes, like us, live and die.

Rain is also explored as analogous with grief:

When we are flooded we are emotionally overwhelmed. When it rains, we withdraw inward, move to an interior place, seek shelter.

Water is a beautiful analogy for the storminess of sadness, the need to retreat and explore the things lurking beneath our own surfaces.

And puddles are no different.

Nabokov relates puddles to the subconscious when he compares them to something called the ‘bend sinister’ (!!!!!! brief aside that I could not contain my excitement when I learnt this word and what it means):

The shimmering shifting mask of the puddle was analogous to the original meaning of the phrase, to “bend sinister” being a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side used on medieval family crests. Nabokov infers his choice of words to mean: “an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror [...] a sinistral and sinister world.”

I feel like we should have a brief interlude so we can all digest how great this is.

Onward!

Water also feels synonymous with wallowing, moping and sobbing.

When I am sad, I feel like a puddle. This idea soothes me perhaps because the word puddle is sweet, and that softens the grief (like our dear sweet Casper), but also because the idea of being a puddle is the right analogy to me for how it feels to be sad. When I am sad I feel softer and flatter and my edges feel more malleable (see: Alex Mac):

When I was a kid, I felt much more malleable in general. I was convinced I could walk through walls if I could just find the right angle or squeeze through someone if I hugged them tight enough. Now, for the most part, I feel much more sturdy and thick, protective of my edges - except when I am sad.

When I am sad I feel looser, less armored up, and more connected with others - like two puddles merging into one larger puddle. This quote from Alan Watts sums it up perfectly I think:

Most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything and yet cut off and alone. I can feel what is going on inside my own body, but I can only guess what is going on in others. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull. Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feeling and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

When you are a puddle, you are majorly earthly, majorly in touch with the universe.

The Marginalian puts it beautifully:

Out of the burning embers of loss arises an ashen humility, true to its shared Latin root with the word humus. We are made “of the earth” — we bow down low, we become crust, and each breath seems to draw from the magmatic center of the planet that is our being. It is only when we give ourselves over to it completely that we can begin to take ourselves back, to rise, to live again.

Or instead of magma, a puddle giving over to being a puddle, before rising up and becoming a cloud.

I think it works.

So as we move into Autumn, the season of puddles, I will be trying to be a little more puddle-like and a little less fully formed.

I’ll end on a poem I wrote while I was feeling a little puddly myself:

See you next week!

Love,

Jemima Puddle-duck.