A Power Greater than Ourselves: Lament or Benediction?

Water dances and the soul delights.

Water sings, too. Even a tiny creek sings and sometimes those most of all with their furious gurgling, trickling, and chortling giggles. Bigger streams, arroyos, wadies, and rivers have grand sounds also, and movements all their own.

Langston’s Mississippi lumbers, Lincoln’s Ohio waddles, Tyler’s Wabash glides, and the mighty Niagara cascades in teams of frothing waves. The brackish Kennebec and island-studded Saint Lawrence heave as they breathe in and out the invisible motion beneath them. Rivers are serpentine anacondas swollen with the life they’ve swallowed, strange attractors pulling us in no matter the dangers. Rivers cast spells and creeks are magical sirens, each with seductive powers and cooing into the soft folds of our ear.

Oceans are the dance masters and most hypnotic of all. Even when bearing their teeth, each white wave swelling with anger and threatening to pull us out to sea, they are the most compelling. We stare helplessly into their wild as the storm gathers and awe pulls a blanket over us. But no less captivating in rare moments of gentleness an ocean bids us enter her rhythmic whispers as waves curl softly over our toes.

Even the thin trickle of a mail-order decorative fountain reels us in. Water is a power greater than ourselves and we are helpless to resist. That is its hold on our soul.

We are water, of water, from the water, and there is an invisible umbilical bond forming sacred webbing between us. We can’t get loose no matter how dry the desert at our feet. Water sings and dances its way into our soul and infiltrates our imaginations and there is nothing we can do to stop its path through our least resistance.

Give in. Let the water sing. Turn up the volume. Watch it dance, naked even, before our very eyes.

We see ourselves in the water and its mysteries provoke and deceive us.

Love it. Let it to be itself. Wash in it. Let it drip on your aging skin and tickle. Feel it running down your check, breast, leg – one drop at a time. Rain, steam, puddle, pond, lake, river, reservoir or ocean it calls us and we return to it on command. We desire to be near it, in it, of it. Water.