Recently, I read a book that contained an account of water seen through the eyes of a man who lived his entire life in the wild. Somehow these words conveyed to me what truly experiencing water as a living being might be like. It also made me realize how far from that I am most days, though I do know in my heart how incredible this substance we more often call a 'resource' is.
This short extract is at the end of a wonderful chapter describing an encounter with a jungle waterfall in Tom Brown Jr.'s book Grandfather (Ch. 9 The Waterfall, p. 146). Really the whole chapter should be read and then the following one which presents a contrasting experience in a desert - 'To understand one, he had to also fully understand the other'.
...I could now plainly understand why Grandfather had been so connected to water. It went beyond the sense of thanksgiving and awe. He used any water as a window to all waters. I imagined that when he touched the waters in our camp area, he in fact was also touching that special waterfall of life in South America. It was like a fusion of consciousness, where Grandfather could tap into the entire global water system by just touching the water. So too did I finally understand that to Grandfather, all water was living. It was a single organism of mind and flesh, and not just of spiritual mind as I once thought. From that day on ... I always approached water as Grandfather had done, realizing for the first time that the water was living.
I have always taught my students that the people of the earth believed that everything had a spirit and thus was alive. They made no distinction between plant and animal, rocks, water, air, and soil. To my students, to me, these things are living before they become flesh. We are the collective consciousness that existed long before we became living. We no longer rush to water in an irreverent way, for we know that we are in fact going back to ourselves, back to our origins, and reuniting with our very blood. In essence, the living waters will be here long after we have become spirit again, and the waters will still contain part of our consciousness as do the rocks, the soil, and the very air. After all, the air we breathe was once breathed by the ancients and the water that has become our blood was once the blood of all living things past.
To see more about the book, go here.
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