Homage to water

Wet sands, slipping waves,
where rims of water trace each
pebble's geometry.

La Vega, summer 2011

The moving shadow
of a cloud sails dark and free
across the ocean.


Llanes, summer 2011

Watching water

We all love to do it. Watching water in flow captivates us with its infinite variety of movement. We go miles to see a waterfall. We picnic by a mountain stream. Something deeply instinctual lies at the heart of our relationship with water, above all in its natural environment.

Yet, as a direct result of our own criminal carelessness, humanity, over the next fifty years, will almost certainly experience an acute shortage of fresh water for consumption and irrigation. And this, together with a surfeit of sea water, as ocean levels rise. Both of these problems arise from squandering, mismanaging and generally abusing the one vital resource without which life on Earth is impossible.

While the problem of water shortage will be huge for countries already facing progressive desertification, by 2050 it will be problematic even for countries such as Switzerland where shrinking glaciers are reducing the storage and replenishment required for a steady water supply. In their turn, Greece, southern Spain, and wide tracts of Australia and south America are threatened by falling river levels and rising salinity in groundwater resulting from poor land and river management.

A deeper understanding of water is essential for our survival, and not just water as a chemical compound (which in itself is mysterious), but in its cycles and behaviour in relation with the rest of nature. We also need to recognise water as a carrier of life and memory. Sensitive studies show that it bears the imprint of what it travels over and through, and “remembers” the influences that are brought to bear on it. Here I am thinking of the studies of researchers like the Japanese Masaru Emoto, Andreas Schulz in Tübingen, Germany, the Herrischried Institute in the Black Forest, and others.

What is at stake here, where the boundaries of current science and technology fade into more subtle realms, is the issue of water quality. The “organics” of the future will have to pay close attention to the intimate link between water quality, food quality and human health, as the fertility of our productive lands deteriorates even further. Anecdotal evidence sugggests that irrigation water proceeding from hydroelectric and desalination plants lacks the generative power of water that has passed through a natural cycle.

Pioneers in water quality research include the Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger, the flow expert Theodor Schwenk and the inventor of the Flowform John Wilkes, who died in March this year. In each case, their wisdom – and warnings of future disaster – arose from closely observing water and its behaviour in the style of research which the eighteenth century poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “delicate empiricism”.

Goethe also referred to water as “the blood of the earth”, a phrase picked up by the title of Allerd Stikker’s book on water resources, an account which ends with the poetic declaration, "Seeing water, being water, I feel part of Creation. I am not alone."

In the same spirit of “seeing”, I will continue to drop into this blog my own occasional close observations on water, in haiku form, as homage to water.

CJM