twigs

. 

And so 
it has taken me 
all of sixty years 
to understand 
that water is the finest drink, 
and bread the most delicious food, 
and that art is worthless 
unless it plants 
a measure of splendor in people's hearts. 


—Taha Muhammad Ali 
So What: New and Selected Poems

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say i am

.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.

To the flashing water say: I am.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
excerpt from The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 29

.

form(ation

 

. 

Each crystal forms around a particle of dust. 

All have a 6-fold symmetry, but no two have ever been found 
with exactly the same shape. 

Their variety and complexity is breathtaking.

—Frozen Planet, 1.01

 .

if you open your eyes

.

  

 

If you open your eyes,
night opens doors of musk,

the secret kingdom of the water opens
flowing from the center of the night. 

And if you close your eyes,
a river fills you from within,
 
flows forward, darkens you:
night brings its wetness to 
beaches in your soul. 

—Octavio Paz 
Early Poems 1935-1955
Muriel Rukeyser translation

.

say i am

 

  .

Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — 
 

a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

. 

  

free

 

.

From birth, man carries the weight of 
gravity on his shoulders. 

He is bolted to earth. 

But man has only to sink beneath the surface 
and he is free.

—Jacques Cousteau 

.

bless

 

.

Living creatures are nourished by food,
and food is nourished by rain; 

rain itself is the water of life.

—Bhagavad Gita

.

you are that

 

. 

Let the waves of the universe rise and fall as they will.

You have nothing to gain or lose.

You are the ocean. 

—Ashtavakra Gita 

. 

September 1961

 

.

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. “It looks like dying”—Williams: “I can’t
describe to you what has been

happening to me”—
H. D. “unable to speak.”
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can’t reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don’t
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea…


—Denise Levertov

.

living water

  

 

.

 

Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.

We did not make it.

Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.

In its abundance
it survives our thirst.

In the evening 
we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,

and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us,
except we keep returning 
to its rich waters

thirsty.

We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth 
of its joy. 

—Wendell Berry

.

mother

 

.

The sea and not the surface of the Earth is the natural home of life.  The surface is hostile to life. The temperature varies into extremes not seen in the ocean. The weather is harsh and violent. A hurricane can be raging on the surface and fifty feet down the sea is calm and untroubled.  Living beings require water and those on land must soon find a constant source or perish.

Terrestrial creatures must strive to keep their water within their bodies and are always in danger of drying out. The sun is incredibly harsh on land when not filtered by the water. Few creatures, even those evolved in the deserts can tolerate constant exposure to the sun. All living creatures require salt and yet salt is a rare commodity on the surface and mainly found where ancient seas once existed. In short when we leave the sea we must take her with us.

We say “Mother Earth” - perhaps it should be “Mother Ocean”.

 

—Sam

.
via samsaran
.

listen

 

 

 

 

 

.

the history of water

.

This is the history of water; how it
drips across skin — faucets, floods, never forgetting
thousands of touches in a meniscus.
There is death and there is birth; how we
swam naked with our bodies sixty percent lake water, the small
islands of our skin surfacing, barely touching.
We’re standing bone-naked in the skeleton of our
shower, history pooling around my ankles:
our skin like oil in all this — all of this,
holding ourselves together by the wetness;
the dewdrops of foliage on our minds — our
mouths collecting sin and hope, faith and
rare miracles, four hundred wars cleaning the
dark hoops of my eyes.
Washing ourselves clean with
the dark bones of secrets, of loss, of famine and
fall and friends who became lovers by accident.
Water, repeating itself — as lather
rinse and repeat, magnolia perfumed bubbles collecting
like salt dunes, our feet pressing into the sand,
the tides cleaning but never
forgetting.

—Shinji Moon

. 

water, a drop of

 

.

Gone are the birds, the leaves, the stars.
Now,
what kind of voyage can you take
in a drop
of water?

—Yannis Ritsos 

.

flow

 

.

"So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in  the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. 

The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. 

Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea. 
 

—Czeslaw Milosz
Robert Hass version

.

sit and be still

 

.

Sit and be still

until in the time

of no rain you hear

beneath the dry wind's

commotion in the trees

the sound of flowing

water among the rocks,

a stream unheard before,

and you are where

breathing is prayer.

—Wendell Berry

. 

 

wells within us

 

 .

There are different wells within your heart.

Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water.

That “love” is literally something of yourself.
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,

Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife

Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

There are different wells within us.
Some fill with each good rain,

Others are far, far too deep
For that.

—Hafiz

Daniel Ladinsky version

.

 

dew light

.

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age


—W. S. Merwin
from the moon before morning

.

seas

 

.

I learned the why of misfortune
In the school of water. 

The sea is a wounded planet
And the breaking is its greatness:
This star fell into our hands
From the tower of salt
Scatters its heritage

Of living shadow and furious light. 

It has not married the earth.

We still do not understand it.


—Pablo Neruda
William O’Daly version

 .

note to self

 

.

Mountains are made by the currents of rivers.

Mountains are destroyed by the currents of rivers.

—Leonardo da Vinci

. 

stream(water

 

.

I drink streamwater and the air

and everything I do becomes clearer.

I become a waterwheel,

turning and tasting you, as long

as water moves.

—Rumi

.

speech but now words

 

.

Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,

I made my way to the snow-covered island.

The wild does not have words.

The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!

I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.

 Speech but no words.

—Tomas Gösta Tranströmer

Robert Bly version

from The Half-Finished Heaven

.

in time and with water, everything changes

 

.

Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, 
sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, 
sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, 
sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, 
sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. 

It suffers change into as many natures as 
are the different places through which it passes. 

And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, 
so it alters with the nature of the place, 
becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, 
incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, 
green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. 
 

Sometimes it starts a conflagration, 
sometimes it extinguishes one; 
is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, 
hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, 
fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, 
speeds or is still; 
 

is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, 
nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; 
at times has a tang, at times is without savor, 
sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. 

In time and with water, everything changes.


—Leonardo da Vinci

.

questions

  

.

 

I have been thinking of the difference between water 

and the waves on it. 

Rising, 

water's still water, falling back,

it is water, will you give me a hint 

how to tell them apart? 

Because someone has made up the word 

"wave," do I have to distinguish it from water? 

There is a Secret One inside us; 

the planets in all the galaxies 

pass through his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at 

with luminous eyes. 

—Kabir 

.

the whole moisty night

  

.

The Viking ship sails into the full harbor.

The body meets its wife far out at sea.

Its lamp remains lit the whole moisty night.

Water pours down, faint flute notes in 

the sound of the water.

—Robert Bly

.

markings

 

.

A field of water betrays a spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. 

It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. 


—Henry David Thoreau 
Walden, the pond

.