In late summer, I would swim and stream-walk a small section of the Raccoon River. While sedimented for decades now, the water was clear in the shallows. For a few years now, the water is pea-green from edge-to-edge. For decades and worse now, this water has strongly contributed to a vast hypoxia zone in the Gulf.

In the 1980s, I wrote about the wisdom of the river, focusing on the Des Moines River as a living, very open metaphor for the essential streaming dynamic of the universe that is within us as well in the streaming of our body metabolism and thought.


Thursday, October 13, 2016

Sacred Water & Iowa, Part One



sacred/ordinary

THE TERM “SACRED” tends to popularly reference something rare, special and exclusive, and often as something distant.  And so, sacred space, sacred landscapes, sacred things and sacred beings tend to be exclusive.  

In modern societies, we tend to feel less dependent on events arounds us.  Turn on the faucet or shower head or flush the toilet and water spews forth--common, everyday, ordinary, nothing special--and therefore not even close to being thought of as sacred.  And because water seems ordinary and common, the spigot is likely to run for longer than we need.  Even though it is right at hand, it is distanced.  Conveniently, we didn’t have to go somewhere to get it, carry it, clean it, store it.  And we know that we are wasteful.

In the flood of 1993, the DMWW was overrun and there was a taste of life without convenient water.  Increasingly, everywhere on Earth, degrading environmental feedback, especially in the form of public health problems and threats to material resources, is provoking a new look at the “ordinary” as perhaps special.  In a changing global environment, we are beginning to experience the ways in which, like indigenous societies, we depend on everything around us.  

Problematically, we look at what we need to do to assure for environmental quality as a serious economic cost to us.  Environment is still seen as a resource that is nature not culture and, therefore, outside out life.  But as we are forced to change, we stand to discover that optimizing the environment reduces economic cost by sustaining rather than repairing something that we absolutely require.

With just a little different experience, everything can be sensed to be sacred.  This is often grasped better in indigenous societies that depend on everything around them.  In this dependence, there is a sense of quality and appreciation in the ordinary.  This new attention to the landscape opens a sense of the landscape already doing things rather than needing our activism.  And not only gain economic value for next to nothing, but also open an inherent sacredness that arises out of experiencing our inseparability.  This sacredness is perhaps best captured in the term “spirituality.”  Spirituality involves an experience of inclusiveness and inseparability and a sense of wisdom, awe and wonder. 

water

We drink of cup of water--8.36 septillion molecules of water [8.36x10 24].  And unless, highly distilled, water contains a soup of everything.  “Clean water” is safe water, not pure water.  Each molecule of water has been imagined to travel around the world for a century, spending most of its life in oceans [98 years], 20 minutes as ice, 23 weeks as river/lake, and less than a week as atmosphere.  But as abundant as water seems (covering 70 percent of Earth surface), 97 percent of water is saltwater, with 3 percent being fresh water, and perhaps two-thirds of fresh water being ice, with a percent being underground water, leaving 0.036 percent as rivers and lakes.  WAter is “abundant, and yet less than one percent of all water on Earth is useable fresh water.  And since we use  
“useable fresh water,” that makes the water that we depend on rather rare.  And all of this water going ‘round & ‘round Earth has been doing so for billions of years with no real new water.  It is billion-years-old world-traveling stuff, and also electronic stuff, with hydrogen atoms being positive and big old oxygen atoms being negative.  this elctronic aspect holds water together [i.e., its everyday stickiness/wetness], allowing it to become a magical solution, but, negatively, when we don’t want it, holding in elements that make it work to get out. 

Water seems ordinary, and yet it is so special.  Biota--flora and fauna--collect around it and/or gather it, making water the primary event in their structure.  There is not biota without water.  It is THE life support system.  It is the primary mini-sea of a cell’s cytoplasm, and it’s polarity makes it dance with energy.  In human beings, a water deficit of 10 percent means that one can no longer walk.

And so it enters our sacred life--the Ganges River in the Far East, and in the West, for example, the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized and the Sea of Galilee and the Grotto at Lourdes.

In the Lakota nation, Mni Wakon, it is said--“water as sacred”--and more generally, water as “the blood running through the veins of Mother Earth.”

Blessing by water is universal.  Why? because sooner or later, and in modern life, usually later unfortunately, water is life, and not something above water.
Human rights are more than human, if we really get that which is going on, and that which optimizes a wise human life.

Therefore, the rights of water, that are not separate from human life, but central, are a quality that we immediately build into human decisions/planning.  The “rights of water” or legal standing for water are not just control of “water rights” that occurs throughout the world where accessible water has now grown extremely sparse. 

When we finally get it, and finally awaken, we are related by water.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water,
So very useful, humble, precious and chaste.
Francis of Assisi, from The Canticle of Brother Sun

In an unsettled Earth, we used to be able to extract resources and then move on.  Now, in a peopled Earth, there are few such resources and no open frontier.  What we do feeds back on us either positively or negatively. And in this unsettled landscapea, there is care in the landscape that has been buoying us up, especially in Iowa in the stored riches of its soil.  And yet we act as if we come from the outside instead of seeing that we are inside the terrain.  We are corporate more than organic.  We take rather take care of.  

In such a context, a few begin to ask, what if streams, rivers and lakes were sacred?
The closer and the more open that one goes to small events and large weathers and landscapes, the more an opportunity for a sense of meaningfulness (without needing to have explicit meaning), awe and wonder.  And when this occurs, we might begin to act differently toward them, and give them more standing in our own actions.

Sacredness and wisdom are close allies.  In Iowa prairies, we find a wise sustainability strategy in the design of the grasses--putting its efforts into the roots and producing fewer seeds, unlike the weed ecosystem strategy of the hybridized grains--producing more seeds with shallow roots. 

In Iowa, water is a resource.  We lack the indigenous “feel” to water.  Perhaps this is the direction of human life, as an agitator and destroyer, like an asteroid destroying the diversity of the Cambrian explosion that included dinosaurs and big life forms. 

But there is another side, as expressed in the anthology of Robert Bly,News of the Universe,  that suggests an enduring drive toward eco-wittedness through the centuries.  In this vision, water is life and sacred when you look at the rarity of life and is complexity.  And there is a sense that our actions can become optimizing and illuminating as they emphasize integration.

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