“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” -Bruce Lee
What Does It Mean To You
There is something really exotic and comforting about being able to say “these are my people”, “those are our trees”, and “this is our land”.
I envy those people, the type who can take a little piece of ownership over places like the Amazon rainforest, or the mystifying expanse of Nordic glaciers.
Those people have a lot of clarity around what they have to lose, and what there is to fight for.
But they also give really annoying advice when it comes to activism and conservation. It mostly revolves around finding the thing that belongs to you.
Finding the “thing” that means something to you.
I never had that “thing”.
All over, I searched for it. Growing up in Miami, Florida, I thought I could convince myself to feel like the coral reefs and mangroves were mine.
Then I got swept away to England, but the rolling hills and bogs felt more like a landscape I was borrowing.
These landscapes were all saturated with history, but it wasn’t my history. It was the history of old English farmers pulling potatoes out of the ground. In Miami, it was the history of forgotten indigenous tribes dotted across the coast.
And that’s the thing about history- it is so often centered around place, and the depth of your roots there.
Instead, my family’s past has never been defined by place, but by movement. From Spain to Cuba, from Cuba to Miami, and from Miami to England.
There is always a pretty good reason for someone to pick up and leave behind everything familiar to them.
But what has been the cost of that movement?
Exclusion- from language, from community.
From being able to point to a place on a map and say, “that has always been ours”.
When you are descended from a long line of immigrants, what is your ancestral responsibility? Can you claim one?
And if you don’t have that mandatory stewardship baked into everything around you, easily accessible when you step outside your home, how do you create it?
Water & Me
I wrestled with these questions, until I realized there was no point in fighting.
Coming from immigrants doesn’t make you less deserving of belonging or community.
It just means that “belonging” looks a little different, and you have to fight a little harder.
And in the world of science and conservation, where the idea of having deep roots in one place lends you a sort of credibility-by-birthright, it’s time to make room for the people who are defined not by the depth of their roots, but by the pattern of their migration.
How It Began
For me, it all began with coral reefs, COVID, and some very open-minded researchers willing to take a chance on a naive 14-year-old girl with Farrah Fawcett hair and developing orthodontic issues.
I remember the summers I spent in that lab.
It would be hours upon hours of scrubbing little tags, removing algae, weighing sample by sample, one at a time, and noting down the mass of each little nub of coral.
They let me listen in on lab meetings, and even present occasionally.
I would learn what I could.
Most of that learning was about the most simple of tasks. For example, one day I would spend hours just weighing samples. Another day I would be cleaning tanks. Sometimes I would sit in front of a scientific paper, and I would simply work to make sense of it.
Fast forward 7 years, and I am still in the world of water and its multifaceted expressions across the world.
But now I’m concluding a summer of studying rivers, and all their invisible isotopic tales.
Water can’t be fenced.
What I love most about studying water is that, much like me, it is all about movement.
Words like ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ are all relative, and everything comes down to how water mixes, how the landscape feeds into the system, what gets carried down a little further and what gets deposited.
Moreover, rivers are about change.
“You never step in the same river twice,” Heraclitus claimed, but the same is also true about each subsequent generation of human beings whose inputs and mixing consists of different countries, languages, and belief systems.
The same way I have taken pieces of myself from everywhere I’ve lived, there are infinite inputs into river and marine systems.
Trying to map them within even a single watershed would make your head spin.
And time never waits for you to finish your analysis. The sources keep mixing, and you just keep chipping away at all the isotopic clues available.
You can delve to bottomless depths of information within a single drop of water- the places it has touched, what those places are made of, how much of those places still lives on in that droplet.
But what I love most of all about watery systems is that they’ve touched every single place I’ve called home.
They are the connecting tissue between every landmass my family has ever occupied. Now, there is peace in knowing that I get to belong to that as a scientist.
No matter how much movement my life brings along with it.
Thought to Action
#1: Pause and Write Your “Failure Archive”: List three things you tried that didn’t go as planned this year. Don’t fix them. Instead, just name them and how they made you feel.
#2: Reframe Effort as Evidence: Track one kind of effort for two weeks (reading time, daily creative minutes, meaningful talks). Let the action be the metric, not just the outcome.
#3: Create a “Growth Pause”: Pick one thing you’ll do less of (doomscrolling, chores as avoidance). Put a boundary around it and note what space that creates for something nourishing.
#4: Rediscover Joy in the Small and Slow: Read one short piece of writing without pressure—no speed goals, no expectations.
#5: Set One “Next Try Intent”: Choose one thing from your failure archive and decide a small, doable step you’ll try next quarter — no perfection, just continuation.
Sources
No external sources were used.
AI Statement
Where was AI used?
SEO keyword research & optimization: This is the boring bit that has to do with aligning what I write with what search engines will put at the top of their pages. I let AI do it so I can focus on being a better writer (my specific AI buddy is Claude).
Where was AI not used?
Image generation: A human being took and selected every photo used in this post.
In any writing, at any point: A human being wrote this post with her heart and brain, not her LLM friends.
