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A Power Greater than Ourselves: Lament or Benediction?

April 15, 2015 By Cam Miller 4 Comments

2006-02-13_Drop_before_impact

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. photo

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 invisible22071_260283012140_33717207140_3177461_516973_n 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. photo 1

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.

Havasu_Falls_2_mdWe 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 dphoto 1-1rip 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.

 

 

Filed Under: DENIM SPIRIT Tagged With: power greater than ourselves, rant, Water

Comments

  1. Mike Wickham says

    April 15, 2015 at 2:05 pm

    Your writing is very lyrical. love it !

    Reply
    • vtravis says

      April 15, 2015 at 2:47 pm

      Music to my ears. Thanks.

      Reply
  2. Judy Kahrl says

    April 15, 2015 at 3:27 pm

    Ah, water. The gurgles when the spring runoff comes are truly musical. At the same time, we can also remember that there are people who walk miles for water every day. When we turn on a tap, let us both rejoice that the water runs and pray that all people may have good access to clean water.

    Reply
    • vtravis says

      April 15, 2015 at 4:46 pm

      Thank you. Having lived most of my life in places with abundant water I need to remember the vast areas of the earth without it.

      Reply

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Each of these posts appeared first in The Finger Lakes Times (NY) as an entry in the weekly series, “Denim Spirit.”

 

Sermons, and preaching as an art, are not for dispensing content or proclaiming doctrines and dogma. Like poetry, prose, and music, they are for provoking and inspiring thought, memory, and imagination within those receiving them. Please allow your thoughts to wander as they will in response to what you hear, rather than following along word for word.

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