…Beautiful, pure, blessed and glorious, forever the same, sparkling pure water! – John B. Gough (Toast to Water)
Water is everywhere: on land and in sea, in air and underground. It can flow smoothly, fall with a splash or vanish from the surface as invisible vapor. It is honored in French by being spelled with three vowels and pronounced as a fourth. [EAU, pronounced as O.]
Water may stand still in a pool, lake or pond, can be tickled into ripples when a stone is flung to bounce on its surface. Or it may flow gently in a stream or brook, gurgling as it skips over pebbles and obstacles along the way. It could be gushing in a river, wide or narrow, under bridges here and there, meandering for miles through towns small and big. Pascal described rivers as chemins qui marchent: roads that walk. They are also roads that carry boats and ships. Sometimes a smoothly flowing river becomes a rapid. Unexpectedly its bed may cease at some place, and the merry flow takes a precipitous fall. Robert Southey described the Cataract of Ladore thus:
“The cataract strong, then plunges along, striking and raging, as if a war waging,
Rising and leaping, sinking and creeping, swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing, flying and flinging, eddying and whisking, spouting and frisking, turning and twisting, around and around, with endless rebound…”
When this is grand, it attracts tourists with cameras who marvel at the plunge of a large river that suffers a terrible surprise, as it were. Facing the Niagara, one is impressed by the never-ending onrush of some 750 thousand gallons of water each second from a height of some 170 feet over a brink that stretches to more than 3 hundred feet! It staggers our imagination that this gigantic downpour has been going on for thousands of years.
Water can be roaring and turbulent as ocean-waves, tossing boats and rafts and massive liners. It is continuously rising as vapor from rivers, lakes, and seas to form clouds. These periodically fall back to the ground as a gentle drizzle, monsoon, shower or hurricane. Water may trickle down as meager strips through crevices like money from the miser or flow smoothly from a jug into a glass. Such are the versatile dynamics of wondrous water.
The ancients pictured a watery flow even in the heavens, calling the whitish patch Via Galactica: Milky Way. Observers in India viewed it as a sacred river up there, naming it Akash Ganga: Ethereal Ganges, a poetic epithet suggesting that if water is the source of life on earth, then heaven is the source of water itself.
We often think of water only as a liquid, cool and fresh on a hot summer day, or boiling in a whistling kettle ready to be transformed into a cup of tea or bowl of soup. But flowing water can also turn to frozen stiffness in little cubes of ice and as mammoth icebergs in the colder recesses of the planet. There is water as moisture in the air too.
Water is abundant on earth: there is immensely more sea than land on the earth. Ironically, today there isn’t enough drinking water everywhere. Sea-water is too rich in salts, not any good for drinking. Modifying Coleridge, a theme in the modern world is:
“Water, water everywhere, not enough for all to drink,
This is something grave, on which we all must think.”
The human body is made up of flesh and bones, muscles and solid matter, but chemically speaking, 70% of it is just water. This is a little less than in the shark whose body is 80% water, or in the lobster which contains 90% water. We put water in plastic bottles, but we ourselves are water in skin-bottles.
Thirst is a reminder of our biological origin from the sea. Thirst is never fully satisfied. That is why Buddha referred to desires as thirst, for, like thirst for water, they keep recurring. Some talk of thirst for transcendence. As Ben Johnson said, “The thirst that from the soul does rise doth ask a drink divine.”
Spurts of Thought 