A Melting Glossary of Water: Seeping into Separations

As a melting glossary, this essay connects bodies of water in the climate crisis by sounding depths from a desert: a place defined by the absence of water. As the author tends to a landscape often associated with death and dying, she grows an unexpected xeric garden, deepening her attention to ways that we tend each other in relation to the health of the Earth. As her glossary melts across places and relations—human, animal, botanical—along with a chorus of environmental writings, water resists being glossed over as an inert natural resource. As more-than-human voices communicate beyond human ways of knowing, decentering any single perspective, the planet's lifeblood of water invites deeper listening, interconnecting us all wherever we are.