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This guest post is part of Sustainable Faith: An Interfaith Season of Creation, a series from MassIPL in which leaders from across Massachusetts' religious and ethical traditions write, in the first person, about how their faith connects with climate. New essays publish each Sunday through October 11th, 2026.
My story spans many geographies. I currently live in the USA. I was born and raised in England. My mother was born in India. My father, of Indian origin, was born in Africa. The idea of crossing oceans for something new is deeply ingrained into my being. As I think of each of those journeys, a single word comes to mind: threshold. As my parents, grandparents, and I myself made each of those crossings, we crossed a threshold. We each left behind something old, something no longer serving us, in order to face something new.
Throughout time, bodies of water - the ocean, rivers, lakes - have been a threshold in the human story, where the old and new worlds meet. Crossing a threshold fundamentally changes us. We stand in it, for a moment, and have to decide something: what do we leave behind, and what do we carry with us? Some of what we carry is worth carrying, but some of it needs to be left behind: assumptions, wounds, destructive patterns that made sense on the other shore and make none on this one.
I have spent the better part of two decades in many corridors of power, the halls of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and others like them, watching people try to cross a threshold that we are all facing: civilizational and ecological. People try to move humanity from the current ecological crisis to a place where these crises are solved. What I have found, time and again, is that we cannot make that crossing. Not because the destination is unclear, but because we are unwilling to let go of the old in order to embrace the new. This challenge is not limited to the corridors of power. I have seen it just as often in the communities I have worked with all around the world, in the churches, in the temples, in the town halls, in the libraries, where people desperately want to move from the old to the new but do not know how to do that.
Nature is the greatest teacher. There are three bodies of water I reflect on when thinking about how we can all cross the threshold to the world we wish to create. We start with the river Ganges, followed by Walden Pond, and finally the ocean itself.
The Ganges arrives on earth through catastrophe. A king's sixty thousand sons are burned to ash by a sage's wrath. It takes a descendant named Bhagiratha a thousand years of prayer to bring the river down from the heavens. He petitions Brahma, the Creator God, to grant him this wish. Brahma agrees, but warns that the force of the river descending from the heavens would shatter the earth. Bhagiratha is told to ask Lord Shiva, residing in the Himalayas, to absorb the impact by allowing the Ganges to first land on his head before flowing onwards.
This begins the story of the Ganges becoming a place of solace for all, regardless of social status, economic standing, or learning. Throughout Hindu history and culture, the Ganges has welcomed everyone. One story that illustrates this most clearly is that of Jagannath Pandit, a seventeenth century Sanskrit scholar. He, as many do, fell in love with someone he was not allowed to. And because of this, he was outcast from his community. His business connections, social connections, and family connections all rejected him. In deep despondency, he went to the steps of the river Ganges in Varanasi and began composing a hymn to the river. As he wrote each verse, it is said that the water rose one step. And as he completed the fifty second verse of this poem, the Ganges reached the top of those steps and carried him away, until he was never seen again.
I have seen, in my years of activism and advocacy work and in other spheres of work, that everybody wants to feel seen and valued and needed. Nobody likes to feel sidelined or cast out. For too long, in climate change and environmental spaces, we have looked down on others. We have told people they are wrong. We have made people feel like their lives, their cultures, their values, and their traditions are no longer meaningful, or have no place in the new world. This has caused significant friction, and much of the polarization we now see within environmental movements. We have mistaken the threshold we need to cross as a conquest, as though the new world could only be built by declaring the old one worthless, and the people who held it worthless along with it.
The second water may be more familiar to us: Walden Pond, just outside of Boston. It is here that Henry David Thoreau went in 1845 at a time when America felt like it was coming apart. The country was industrializing at a significant pace through the creation of railroads and the telegraph system, reconfiguring old patterns of work and life. Slavery was polarizing the country, and the arguments over it were growing sharper and more urgent by the year. Three years before Thoreau went to Walden, his brother John had died of tetanus, a loss that affected him deeply. He went to Walden, in part, to get some distance, from the noise of a nation in upheaval, and from a sorrow he had not yet found the space to sit with.
He stayed two years, two months, and two days. When he finally left, he did not retreat further into private life. He went the other way entirely, back into the world, and into some of the most contested fights of his time. He protested slavery openly, sheltered people escaping it, and refused to pay a tax he believed funded an unjust war, a refusal that landed him in jail for a night and later became the basis for his essay on civil disobedience, a piece that would go on to shape Gandhi and, through him, Martin Luther King Jr. The man who had gone to the woods to step back from the world came out of them ready to act on it, with more clarity and more conviction than before.
What made that possible, I think, was what the waters of Walden actually gave him: a space to step back from the noise of the world and ask what he was, underneath all of it. He wrote that he went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if he could not learn what it had to teach. When he finally left, he said it plainly: he left the woods for as good a reason as he went there, because he felt he had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
I think this is true more generally, and it has certainly been true in my own life. Before we can step forward into the world to act, we often need to step back first, to reflect, to sit with the harder questions of purpose and meaning that urgency never gives us room to ask. Only once we have done that sufficiently are we able to step forward again, freer than before, and with more impact than we would have had if we had simply kept moving without ever stopping.
The third water is the one I was actually standing beside when I first told this story: Cape Cod, where the Mayflower anchored before moving onward to Plymouth, the literal place where an old world had to cross into a new one on this continent. The Pilgrims had crossed an ocean trying to leave behind the world that had failed them. But they could not leave behind what they carried inside them. The ocean crossing was real. The inward one never happened. The worldview sailed across intact and took root, and we are still living with what it built: the belief that the natural world exists for our use, that growth without limit is possible, that the crisis belongs to someone else.
I don't say this to judge the Pilgrims. I say it because I recognize the pattern in myself, and in this movement. It is far easier to cross an ocean, to sign a new accord, launch a new coalition, write a new statement, than to actually do the harder work of the threshold: deciding what to leave behind and what to carry forward, and being honest about which is which.
It is far easier to cross an ocean, to sign a new accord, launch a new coalition, write a new statement, than to actually do the harder work of the threshold: deciding what to leave behind and what to carry forward, and being honest about which is which.
I believe we are standing at exactly that kind of threshold now. Scientists, Indigenous communities, faith traditions, and young people are independently arriving at the same understanding from radically different starting points: that water connects every shore to every other shore, that the health of the land and the health of a people are not two questions but one. The only real question is whether we are willing to let it change what we carry, or whether we will carry the old world across the water once again, dressed in new language.
Editor's note: Gopal Patel shared an early version of this reflection at the Unitarian Church of Barnstable on Cape Cod in May 2026, as part of a three-part offering introducing Hindu approaches to the environmental challenges we face. Together with MassIPL Executive Director Rev. Michael Reed and the Faith Communities Environmental Network (FCEN), he explored how religious traditions, science, and civic engagement can inspire climate action and shared responsibility for the Earth. Shortly afterward, Gopal traveled to Mombasa for the Ocean Interfaith Forum, continuing his work in support of our oceans, which you can see here.
The Season of Creation is here, and this year's theme is Living Water. Explore our monthly links to pray, act, and mobilize for climate across Massachusetts.
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Introducing 'Sustainable Faith: An Interfaith Season of Creation Series for MassIPL.
