Our driveway almost disappeared yesterday.

So much rain fell here over the past 4 days that an important culvert got blocked by silt, soil and rocks funneled down by water gushing down the slope. We live in a glade below a hill and the road, close to the edge above the Spaulding Brook below, so snowmelt and rainwater stream down a narrow trench and reach a culvert that ordinarily routes them under the driveway and down to the Brook, now in full white-water frenzy till it reaches the Connecticut River over a mile away.

There’s a second culvert further down, closer to the house, so when the first shut down, the water continued on its way to the second culvert, which did a yeoman’s job in funneling it to the chasm on the other side. But it wasn’t enough, and some water began to flow sideways in rivulets down the driveway.

This happened twenty years ago and we paid lots of money to have the driveway re-graveled. I inspected the culverts yesterday morning, eyeing the pool that had accumulated by the first (see above). With that much water there, there was nothing to do till the level goes down. I shrugged. It’s just money, I thought. We ourselves are in no danger, unlike so many others in the South whose lives and homes were threatened by these storms.

But it isn’t just money. When you live rurally on a few acres of land, the land itself, with its trees and shrubs, are your body. They talk to you; over time, if you give them attention, you start learning their language. Every single thing has its own language, but how much do I listen before I start categorizing it as sentient or nonsentient, as rock, flower, beech, weed, and lose interest?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how all our brains—or their equivalents—are wired so differently one from the other. I’m sure that’s true not just for humans but also for other beings. I’m fortunate to have friends. Over time, I’ve noticed how differently I approach things from them. Our minds—like the slope outside the house—are grooved differently, our tissues, lobes and synapses operate differently.

I read a lot about brain rewiring when Bernie had his stroke, but not in the past eight years; a great deal more has been explored since then. As I get older, I recognize more and more how differently we communicate, how high or low we build our walls of identity, who and what we let in and who and what we keep out, and how much of my judgment of others implicitly assumes that others function like me.

Of course, if you want to live in society, you will make adjustments. But some of us feel so alienated from others, or else unsafe because we sense that others are so different they can’t understand us at all. We usually find our way to accommodate the needs of jobs or family, but often we withdraw to a more private domain where we don’t have to make accommodations, where we feel free to be us.

My heart has been opening to people who feel they need to take such shelter. They may be refugees from a world that calls certain behaviors and language uses normal, automatically relegating other variations to abnormal. They try to make their way through complex relationships they can’t fully comprehend and wonder why, given how hard they work to adapt and make themselves understood, they are still judged harshly, they are still Other. So they retreat to addictions—drink, food, drugs—in order to relax, to feel safe once again.

One of the reasons I like to watch Aussie is to see her trying to make dog sense of my actions, how she’s invited to join me in a car ride and other times not, how I don’t respond to smells and sounds that call to her so powerfully. Her eyes watch me, questioning. On some level, she understands that she’s a canine surviving in a human world. But so many humans have to do the same thing.

Our personal history, religion, and culture carve out different grooves in our ever-malleable brain. For instance, I understand why so many American Jews have a hard time condemning the Israeli government for what it’s doing to Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s not that they forgot their traditionally liberal values, it’s that they carry in their mind a chronic, historical fear of antisemitism and the need to combat it through unity regardless of price. Even as I have declared my own fierce opposition, I know what they feel in my own bones. I have no doubt that that fear has affected the organic make-up of my brain, as it has many others.

We think that family, culture, religion, etc. exert some external influences on us. But what’s outside is inside. Everything that has ever happened is right there, an organic part of my cells—and of course, they change. We wire and rewire all the time; it helps to be aware of the influences that have gotten under our very skin and become a part of us.

Sometimes it all felt too much for me these past days. The water swamping us, the driveway at risk, a deep sense that I can’t make head or tail of this current landscape anymore, not the physical, not the political or relational, that reality demands of me the kind of wide view that my eyes don’t possess, relationships that make no sense to me, words my ears can’t hear.

In the middle of the misunderstandings and basic ignorance that continue well into my 8^th decade after so much practice, what gives me confidence? I am humbled by feeling at a loss by the range and complexity of everything around me, and the wish to find solid ground under my feet.

And regardless of how we’re wired, don’t we want the same thing? We want a place in the world. We want a soothing cup of coffee and basic acceptance, not to feel like strangers, misunderstood and harshly judged.

Nothing to do but wait for the pool of water to subside, slowly, slowly. Let fear go and bear witness to all the obstructions, try to clean up as much as possible knowing full well I can’t control future floods bringing down more silt and rocks. Finding, in my friend Michel Dobbs’ words, Buddha fields everywhere.