THE FLOW OF ORIGINAL THINKING

[Michael Grove]

 

 I would be particularly pleased if society directed its efforts to restoring

 watersheds and rivers above all else, because nothing else could be more

 important. ONLY 3% of the water on the planet is of the fresh water

 category and of that, less than three-tenths of 1% is free flowing (the

 rest being trapped in glaciers or polar ice caps) – and a great majority of

 that free-flowing water is polluted. The restoration of a river can often be

 accomplished by simply removing dams. Damming rivers is damaging to

 everything: to the river, to the fish, to the trees and ecosystems around

 the river, and to human beings too. THE NATURE of WATER is to FLOW.

 This article was adapted from Original Thinking: A Radical ReVisioning

 of Time, Humanity, and Nature by Glenn Aparicio Parry, and is reprinted

 with the permission of North Atlantic Books © 2015.

 Leonardo da Vinci carefully examined the qualities of water and filled

 voluminous notebooks with observations. He found that, amongst other things,

[water] percolates through all porous bodies. Against its fury no human defence avails, or if it should avail it is not for long. In its rapid course it often serves as a support to things heavier than itself. It can lift itself up by movement or bound as far as it sinks down. It submerges with itself in headlong course things lighter than itself. The mastery of its course is sometimes on the surface, sometimes in the centre, sometimes at the bottom. One portion rises over the transverse course of another, and but for this the surfaces of the running waters would be without undulations. Every small obstacle whether on its bank or in its bed will be the cause of the falling away of the bank or bed opposite to it.

 When water does all these things in a seemingly effortless way, is it merely a  

 mechanical reaction to circumstances, or is it a form of intelligence that thinks

 and makes fluid decisions that embody an active balancing process? I would opt

 for the latter. I believe water is as alive and conscious as you or I. If this

 seems hard to accept, why is water considered alive when it is inside the human

 body – where it is renamed ‘blood’ – but outside the human body it is

 considered inert or dead? It would be absurd to say that water within us is not

 alive, because we are made up of 70% water. But what exactly is the difference

 between the water inside and the water outside the body? If there is none,

 why is only the water within us considered to be alive? The same could be said

for air or any of the other elements.

 WHY do we separate our inner body and outer world in this manner? 

 All the elements act in similar ways whether they are inside or outside the

 human body, which is, in part, why human beings are considered the

 microcosm of the macrocosm.

 This is something Leonardo da Vinci also realised. In his notebooks, he wrote:

Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world, and indeed the term is rightly applied, seeing that if man is compounded of earth, water, air and fire, this body of the earth is the same; and as man has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, so the world has the rocks which are the supports of the earth; as man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world; as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spread their branches through the human body, in just the same manner the ocean fills the body of the earth with an infinite number of veins of water.

 

 I love poring through the notebooks of da Vinci, particularly when he speaks

 about water.  Water is life, water is us, and until we realise this we will never

 change our ways, the ways that are threatening to destroy us. For if we do not

 realise that water is life, and we continue to imagine that the water outside our

 bodies is somehow of lesser importance than the water inside our bodies, we

 will continue to disrespect the bodies of water on Earth, and we will continue to

 pollute the water, which only ends up harming ourselves because we are the

 water that we are polluting.

 WATER is our CLOSEST RELATIVE; we can no longer pretend to distance

 ourselves from her or to degrade her into a mere utilitarian resource – an

 abstract other. Water has the right to be; she has the right to exist in the way 

 Nature intended, serving all of life. When we extract her energy for

 hydroelectric power or pollute her with our industrial wastes, we are pursuing

 our short-term cash flow at the expense of the life force on Earth for the longer

 term. We do not own the water, the land, the air, the fire. These are simply

not ours to own, because they are the essence of all life, not just [y]ours.

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