Let There Be Water

My imagining of God's imagining in creating this thing we call water:

Water, said the Creator.  Now that will take some time.  I think I’ll make it solid, liquid, gas, a trinity of a thing.  It will be separate and distinct but when it comes together, it will be a unity of one-ness that no one can distinguish one drop (that’s what I’ll call each speck of it) from another.  

And ice – what a powerful, beautiful, wondrous thing that will be.  I think I’ll capstone this planet thing with ice.  But in between there shall be oceans and oceans of this, my most amazing creation of all.  From it shall come all life.  Water, rather than dust, shall be the evidence of my lasting creativity.

And then there shall be rains – not one, but many.  Soft sprinkles, so light, so delicate a touch that they shall barely notice it.  And plenishing rains that shall bring forth the greening of things.  And rains mixed with wind that make a soul bitter when it forgets the deep things that have need of the rains too.  And drops thrown so forcefully from the heavens they bounce and bounce again when they meet with solids.  And monsoons and typhoons and spring rains and sheets and drizzles and dreich drenching droplets-of-it-filled days of nothing but rain and freezing rains and waters that hang in the sky deciding what they will be – some pouring rains, some fog – and torrential rains and phantom rains and cleansing rains – yes, rain shall be my masterpiece.

And with the rains, they shall know thirst.  That shall be their great mystery, the thing once unlocked that makes it all clear.  Oh, you, my creatures.  You are not earth.  Of the earth, but not the earth, you were made unlike the trees, for you were made to move, with the winds and the waters.  Planting was not intended for you.  I already planted my garden and you were not it.  You are the seed on the wind.  Trust the wind to take you where you need go and the waters will find you and you them.  Hold loosely the ground beneath your feet.  Go where the waters flow.  You knew this once.  Even I am not sure when you lost this knowing.  May the rains bring it back to you.

Carrying Water

Only as an adult did I realize that my family spent every Sunday at my grandparents’, not so I could play outside or hang with my cousins, but so we could help Grandma and Grandpa carry water from the spring for the week.

My grandparents did not have running water until the last year of my Grandfather’s life.  That means they had no hot water heater, and hence no hot water save what was boiled on the stove.

It means they had no toilet.  They used a chamber pot and had an outhouse.

They were spare people – spare of material goods, spare of waste, spare of words.

They appreciated the cost of everything.

Two generations later, I find myself part of a wasteful generation that throws things away rather than repairs them; that lets the water run simply to let it run; that uses drinking water to flush away its waste (something that puzzles many of my friends from other parts of the world).

I have completed my grandparents’ cycle in some ways, having returned from town life to country life, and yet, even now, I find myself in a tiny village held captive by the water ways of modern life, as we had to stop drinking from the flowing waters (not clean enough) and drink from treated wells, only to find the treated wells contaminated and unusable and having no other source of water because the other sources have been cut off from us – and it’s been thus for over a year now, that we’re supposed to be boiling our water for all purposes (save showering, I suppose).

Turns out when it comes to water, I’m living more like my grandma than the people of my own time.  How’s that for ironic, Grandma?

H2O

From water to ice

sleet in between

to melt to vapor

the H20 of it all

does nothing in

and of itself –

the molecules

do not decide

to become one

thing then another

they are acted upon

and in the acting

become something

that is both self

and other than self

science and magic

all in one (or actually

in three – this trinity

of molecules that in

their threeness are

one who can be three)

today it’s the twoness

of the three that holds

sway in my world

the vacillation between

water and ice to water

again as temperatures

rise and fall and rise

again – the freezing a 

stop clock kind of thing

for we inhabitants of 

their larger world where

the multitude of molecules

look a complete whole 

in our regard – a sheet

of ice, we say – 

their communion into a

one from their many a

thing of wonder for we

are seldom so united

that our simple being

changes a world – ask

any tree what it is to

bear the weight of them –

those many molecules –

there is no separation,

no distinction – there is

merely weight and burden

I wonder whether the tree

ever considers the beauty

I doubt it – it’s hard to see

beauty when you’re bent

down from the weight

and I wonder if the ice

that is water in another

life ever considers the

cost to the tree of its

very existence – I doubt

that too – it is simply

being and in simply 

being, there’s not much

introspection – or so 

I suspect – who can know

the mind of a molecule

of water turned ice?

Not I

When We Were Nomads

No man ever steps in the same river twice.   –Heraclitus, 5th century BCE

Checking out the map showing all the rivers in the United States, I got to pondering water, thinking that the United States could be called instead the land of many waters, which reminded me of the Heraclitus quote above.

I wonder if Heraclitus, a stern philosopher of his own time, ever pondered the good fortune or divine providing, depending upon one’s point of view, I suppose, of living in a land plentiful with water, for only a people well-provided with water would understand an axiom predicated upon standing in a river and contemplating the passing of its collection of droplets as it swirled on its way between and around his legs.

When considering the planet as a whole, we have indeed been blessed with an abundance of water, but not so in many particular localities, where water is so scarce it’s but a dream on a wisp of a cloud in an otherwise cloudless expanse of sky, where it’s a thing fought for and over, where ownership is claimed and contested, as if the truth of Heraclitus’ observation could be subverted and the claim made for this drop of water be made universal to every drop this way comes.

I wonder, thinking on such things and want to create, at least in my own imagining, a world where nomads wander freely with the waters and where, because of such mobility of purpose, there is no strife, for there is always enough, if one has but legs to get him there.

But that’s a dream and I know it.  In Iraq a few years ago, there was such a drought (it may continue, I do not know) that shepherds walked their flocks from southern Iraq ever northward into the higher elevations, seeking water.  What could seem a pastoral story of the struggle for survival became something uglier as fights and violence broke out between the southern Arabs on the move and their northern Kurdish neighbors over grazing and water rights and one shepherd was killed in the fighting.

I dream sometimes about peace in the Middle East being tied to the international development of desalination on a large scale, solving the problem of water scarcity.  But friends are always quick to point out that whatever is offered for free or the common good is all too often exploited for the good of the few.

It’s enough to make an optimist despair, this unwillingness or inability to even imagine that there might be another way.

Life was harder in many ways when we were nomads.  But the desert rule of hospitality, of the welcome of the stranger and even the enemy, was born in the hearts of the nomads, who well knew how essential such reciprocity was.

How have we lost that?

Was it always only a myth?

I don’t think so, for I have been on the receiving end of the hospitality of enemies, sharing their table out of that ancient idea and custom.

When we were nomads, we well knew where the waters lay.

But now, sedentary people, we forget that the rivers move and nothing is forever.  We forget that the blessing of many waters we may enjoy in one region will move with the sands of time to another.  We forget that blessings are for a season.  We forget at our peril.

And so it is that in our forgetting, the Colorado River no longer flows into the Pacific as it once did via the Sea of Cortez, because of the many dam projects in the US when the Colorado ran plentiful and there was no drought.  PBS

When we were nomads, we knew the blessing of standing in the river and we knew it was a different river than the ones in which our ancestors drank and washed, even as their feet and ours touched the same bedrock.

We knew some things when we were nomads.

I don’t know if it made us kinder or better, but in many ways, I think it made us wiser.

Water, Water, Everywhere*

Jack & Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water . . . 

The itsy, bitsy spider went up the water spout . . . 

Over the water and over the sea . . . 

Little drops of water . . . 

There’s water in the rain barrel . . . 

Dark brown is the river . . . 

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream . . . 

Down by the old (not the new but the old) mill stream . . . 

March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers 

Nursery rhymes and songs I learned as a child echo in my mind as the rains come and come and come.  Water is much with us, and a good thing.  But this week, I have been mindful of water in a way I haven’t been since spending time in Iraq, where the water is often unfit for human consumption, and being a desert clime, incredibly scarce.

Illustration of The Ryme of the Ancient
Mariner.  Illustrator:  Paul Gustave Doré

For while the rains come here in a poor imitation of the monsoons of Asia, the water in the ground, coming as it does in my small village, through a water treatment plant instead of a spring or well, is unfit to drink.

They’ve found E-coli in our drinking supply.  Thus we are to boil all our drinking water.  No problem, I thought.  I’ve done this before.  So I boiled a good supply of drinking water, and in anticipation of the water being shut off to find the source of the problem, filled the bathtub with water for cleaning and flushing.  I washed the dishes and then rinsed them with Clorox.  And I remembered to keep my mouth shut in the shower (not as easily done as you might think).

No problem, I told myself – I’m an old hat at this.

But I forgot one thing: I brushed my teeth with the water from the sink.

Oops.

And then I remembered that you can’t forget anything.

And what I forgot is the most important thing of all: mindfulness.  Mindfulness of everything you do is called for when the drinking water isn’t safe and water itself is in short supply.  Bathing becomes a luxury instead of a daily routine.  Securing drinking water is part of the daily routine; there is, there can be, no forgetting.

I’m lucky – this is only a temporary situation for me.  I will not have to hand carry water from a distance.  I will not have to keep bleaching my dishwater.  I will not have to remember to boil any water that could go into my mouth.

No one that I know who does have to do these daily chores necessary to sustain life complains.  It’s simply the way things are.  It was my own attitude as well when I was there.  But I am here now, and in the land of plenty, with so very much for which to be grateful, I must continually remind myself to the task of gratitude.  I wonder why that is?  I wonder why we with so much are so often the least grateful?  I am sorry for the interruption of our steady supply of good water and its impact on others less able than I to cope.  But I am also grateful – for the reminding call to be grateful, if nothing else.

___________
*From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.