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NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 57th episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d It will be available starting 17 October 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n The quarterly Miaaw Review<\/em> will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It\u2019s free, you won\u2019t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Betsy Damon is a force of nature.<\/strong> There\u2019s no other way to say how visionary, dynamic, and energetic she is despite the challenges the years sometimes bring to long lives. (When I get together with friends in my age cohort, we joke that the conversation starts with the \u201corgan recital,\u201d a list of ailments and kvetches. Betsy does not kvetch.) I was thrilled when she agreed to come on the podcast. As you listen to her stories, you may want to follow along on her website<\/a>, which has a lot of great documentation, and may also be inspired to read her book which offers a lot more detail: Water Talks: Empowering Communities to Know, Restore, and Preserve their Waters<\/em><\/a>, with a forward by the late Jane Goodall. <\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois asked Betsy to describe her path as an artist<\/strong>. \u201cI think every human being is really creative, but cultures just squash it out of you. But I kept mine, and that\u2019s the only way I can thrive. It started very young. I\u2019m very aware of the decision that I made when I was younger than three years old, which was, \u2018this is way more fun than listening to grownups.\u2019 So I got in trouble for drawing too much. But also, I was lucky. I sometimes went to a school where you got to paint on the walls. My first education was in one room in Turkey. We didn\u2019t have anything, so you had to play with pine cones or climb trees all the time. <\/p>\n \u201cI ended up going to Skidmore, which had an art program, and then Columbia. But I never wanted to be anything else. No one told me there were art schools. They didn\u2019t tell me you can really do this. I was really pissed off. It was not considered a respectable career. I was supposed to be a wife. There was nothing else to be. And while it has changed a great deal, I would say that at least in my country, sexism is alive and well, and I especially get bump up against it. If I do these big projects, they\u2019re like, \u2018how do you do that? You\u2019re a woman.\u2019 Especially the science part.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I heard about feminism, I think it took me five minutes. I didn\u2019t have to study it. In my family, boys got the resources to be something. I came from a fairly well off family. My brothers would get larger allowances. Why? Because they had to pay for girls. I would get a smaller portion of meat at dinner. It wasn\u2019t conscious. It was just there. When things were hard, I was always supposed to be home to take care of whatever. I\u2019m the oldest of four. If they fought, it was my fault. I couldn\u2019t say, \u2018I\u2019m busy.\u2019 So it was just the air I breathed. When I came back from Germany feminism had started here. In Germany, there wasn\u2019t that intense discrimination. I showed in the Haus der Kunst when I was, like, 28 years old, and I could get right in the conversation. At Columbia, I was told to take the ovaries out of my paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d read about Betsy experiencing an epiphany that shaped her relationship to the natural world<\/strong> and set her on her path of working with water. I asked her to share it. In the early 80s, she and a group of collaborators had been able to realize a dream project of casting a riverbed in the mountains of Utah in handmade paper:<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d be working on the riverbed, like pouring the paper, and you\u2019d have to pat it over the stones. At the end of 10 hours one day, I looked at the sky, and there was the Milky Way coming out. I went, \u2018it looks just like the riverbed, and I know nothing about water.\u2019 A man came by who knew the Indigenous culture in the valley, and I learned that they call the Milky Way \u2018The River of Stones.\u2019 And everything fell into place. I said, \u2018I\u2019m going to give my life to learning water and whatever my skills are, whatever they aren\u2019t, this is my life.\u2019 So then what do you do? That was 1985. What do you make? And most people today\u2014I\u2019m sorry if I offend some people\u2014they say, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m working with water,\u2019 and they paint the surface of the water or make beautiful things. But no, you\u2019re not working with water. You want to support everyone, but basically, if you really treat water or get close to water, she\u2019s the creator of every single thing. She is a verb, not a noun, a verb, and not for sale.<\/p>\n Of the ambient disconnection from this truth, said Betsy<\/strong>, \u201cThis disconnect has gotten so great. There\u2019s something so disconnected from life that\u2019s happening now that if I talk about it too much, I\u2019ll just cry. I pursued my wanting to know water, and the conclusion I came to took quite a while, because I tried things like having rain fall on paper and see what happened, and I can carve a stone to look like the water carved it, and all that, but I still was objectifying the situation, and I didn\u2019t want to do that. So I started bringing artists together in northern Minnesota with a grant to address the pollution in Minnesota. I took that experience when I went to China.\u201d<\/p>\n Betsy\u2019s book and website are the best places to read about her long stretch of impressive and impactful work in China<\/strong>. But it started with a drink of water. \u201cI\u2019d already been to China several times and I had ended up at what I call the god water. When I drank there, I\u2019ve never felt so alive. Almost nobody in the United States has ever drunk water like that. In China, although they have this huge population, they still had preserved very high-quality water sites. I ended up at the very first environmental conference, which was Qigong masters and engineers, a great combo.\u201d That catalyzed a chain of projects cleaning waters. In Chengdu, artists came from all over to get to know each other and brainstorm a plan of work that led to the Living Water Garden<\/a> in which polluted water travels through seven stages of a wetland filtration system and emerges clean. <\/p>\n \u201cIt goes through what\u2019s called a constructed wetland,\u201d Betsy explained, \u201cbut it also goes through flow forms, which are these forms that assist water to move in a vortex motion. The primary motion of water is the vortex. Every time you straighten something, it will always try to move in a vortex motion. The biodynamism of a strong vortex motion is one of the essential rhythms of creating life. And so every time you straighten pipe, it\u2019s like if you took the heart out of our bodies. That\u2019s the closest I can come to it.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s much more in the episode<\/strong>. This was a fascinating and enlightening conversation. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll enjoy as much as Fran\u00e7ois and I did.<\/p>\n \u201cYou Don\u2019t Miss Your Water<\/a>,\u201d Ruthie Foster and William Bell. <\/p>\n