The Abysmal (Water) in Community

A friendship or group is in the gorge — a difficult passage that keeps giving you more difficulty. Be water: flow through each problem fully rather than bracing against it, stay genuinely yourself with people (danger strips pretence anyway — let it), and strive only for small gains (line 2). One honest conversation, one repaired thread, this week held together well — grand reconciliations and sweeping group overhauls exceed what strained minds can carry; they belong to calmer times. Keep the earthen-vessel plainness of line 4: when things are hardest, drop all social ceremony and posturing. Plain truth, plainly given, is the ration that gets a circle through the dark stretch — and it never gets blamed.

The dark water may be loneliness itself — a season of feeling unseen, or a string of connections that ended badly enough that you brace at the thought of trying again. Water's counsel is twofold. Don't set up house in the abyss (line 1): isolation grown familiar becomes the pit, and comfort with being cut off is the danger, not the cure. But don't lunge for rescue either — the group grabbed at as a life-raft becomes its own gorge. Fill this low place completely: feel what's real, learn what it teaches, and pass on when it's full. Walk in lasting virtue meanwhile; steady character through the dark is exactly what you'll be glad of on the far side.