Friday, October 30, 2015
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Monday, October 05, 2015
Finding your place inside a single glass of water...
So, I was getting a glass of water last night before I went
to bed. Nice glass of water with a few ice cubes. And I looked at those ice
cubes and I thought about the life span of those ice cubes. You see, those ice
cubes came out of my fridge, which took hours of churning and spinning or
whatever the hell it does to spit out ice cubes in my glass on command. And
that’s exactly what it did, giving me this nice glass of ice water.
And as I brought that glass up to my mouth, I realized that
the life span of those ice cubes traces back a lot longer. Because those ice
cubes were made of water pumped from miles – hundreds of miles – away. Since I
live in Southern California, I could even say thousands of miles away. A rain
cloud smiles on a flower somewhere in Yakima or Boise and through the magic of
semi-modern engineering I’ve got ice cubes.
And not a second passed before I understood that I had no
idea of scope here. And I just gave up on the ice water. Those ice cubes had come
from water that went far beyond Yakima or Boise or wherever it fell as a
raindrop. Because that raindrop had been collected on the other side of the
world, and those water molecules predate even semi-modern engineering. They
predate all of our cities. They predate anyone we’ve ever read about and
anything anyone has seen. They were old when the first creature walked and that
very same water was imbibed then, too.
And it passed through their bodies and it evaporated and it
froze and it eroded and it shimmered and it cleaned ecosystems and it hit
umbrellas and maybe just things that looked like umbrellas until it fell on
that flower and took a ride to my ice maker.
Now, this is where my mind took a turn. Because once you
follow that water up from the primordial goo, you also have to take it far past
you. And me. That ice is going to shoot through me at a rate that would make it
dizzy, if such a thing were possible. I’ll eject it in the standard way –
please let our standards be equal here – and it’ll sail off to some new
horizon, some distant shore, some foreign tap.
And it will outlast you and you and you. It will be around
long after all of your children turn into little, old people. It will pass
through no type of creature you’ve ever heard of and that will be right here on
Earth. It will bathe the flesh of people we probably wouldn’t recognize who
worship dieties of one type or another you’ve never heard of before, who use
currency more valuable than anything you have, own technology so much better
than yours it’d make you sick.
Everything will pass before and behind and beneath and all
around that water until it has passed as well. And through this glass of water,
we are given an incredible gift. A way to not only observe our world but to
taste our world, to be a part of our world, to see our place in our world, and
to partake in the miracle that is our world.
What more do you need?
Sunday, October 04, 2015
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