...water in emotion...

...I've gleaned somewhere that blogs, or at least many of them, are about what people think and feel about things, responses to the world around them, the worlds inside of them. I've spent hours and hours on my blogs, finding links and resources and information, researching this or that and it seems it might be time to speak from the heart.

There is a multitude of joy, of anger, of frustration, of concern, of awe, of respect, of gratitude and admiration with respect to water. For as close as my heart and mind and body feels to this powerful, life-giving element and for as much as I believe in the ultimate human ability to rise above its own mediocrity and behave as though it is a conscious, living, breathing, intelligent earthen dynamic, I have a lot of fear and dread.

My heart sinks every time I see a student look up at me with a bottle of water next to their notebook. I cringe when I see a young person, or anyone, like I have on the trains and busses, ravenously glugging down seemingly ignorant swigs of corporate water, trying not so diligently to keep my judgements in check. I recoil at the the idea and presence of the suburban lawn or the over-abundance of golf courses all over north america that suck up fluid resources more and more because mono-culture doesn't work. I die inside when I see the televised smoke of burning rainforest billowing up into the sky, forcing its fiery way disrespectfully into the hydrological cycle. I cry inside when I think of billions of toilets flushing every day, swirling "waste" into the sacred waters of the earth when it is the earth and nature that more readily accepts this gift from our sacred bodies. My anxiety deepens when I think of people who walk away from running faucets or statements to the populace that remind us that letting the water run when we brush our teeth or shave is a bad thing when by all estimations we should have already known that a trillion gallons ago. Red flags go up as I hear of well-meaning organizations trying to bring flush toilets to indigenous people instead of composting toilets...as if they needed these things instead of their own balanced ways that have been colonized out of their consciousness. I weep when I think that we don't even think or hear or learn or feel...about water.

So many of us in the "western", modern, capitalist, industrial, "developed" (what parts of humanity have actually been developed in this screwed up society?!?), pseudo-democratic sub-world act as though nature is our plaything, that we can simply call a sacred element a “natural resource”, a commodity and that there will be no negative repercussions on any physical, emotional or spiritual level. Comedian Kyle Grooms did an insightful and tragically hilarious bit on bottled water and water parks that points us to one of our deepest modern pathologies...our disrespect for water and it's ultimate importance in our physical, social and spiritual lives. Seeing sculptured, controlled water fountains in industrial parks hits me like a brick in the gut. Watching us chlorinate gallons and gallons and more thousands of gallons of water just so we can slide one hundred feet into a chemicalized pool of cool water gives me serious pause, makes me sick, makes me wonder if we haven’t been seriously cognitively affected by those chemicals.

There IS something in the water!

And I can't get past the thought and deep, gut-bone knowing that we could and should be doing PETA-style tactics on anyone we see carrying a plastic bottle of store-bought, corporate-stolen water. Why wouldn't we scream at them that they are killing us by buying into this twisted concept of CON-sumerist exploitation...why wouldn't we call them to task on the bus or the train or at the office or at the conference or in their homes for this ultimately disrespectful, wasteful, damaging practice?! We would easily think someone nearly insane for singing and dancing freely on a city street, but we walk quietly past anyone who carries a bottle of water when every sane and informed perspective on this practice shows us that it is a wasteful, earth and "resource"-damaging concept that displaces ground water from the places that need it most, from the very places nature herself decided it should be to send it to places and people far away, the essence of enviro-benefit displacement. People in India threw Coca-cola out of their farming communities when the factory polluted the environment and the pumping of water decreased the water well levels to dangerous, crop and life-threatening lows. And we don't rise up and scream and fight and yell at the top of our lungs when a Coke truck rolls by?!



Where is OUR anger? Where is OUR outrage?! Where is OUR intelligence and principled thinking?! Where and when is our action to be seen doing what is necessary to destroy the systems and ways of thinking that are destroying us?!?

Where is the heart-felt knowing that we are desacralizing the sacred, that we are violating the inviolable, that we are killing the life blood of the earth, our bodies and our very souls?

(Bechtel's Hoover Dam, now 75 years old)

We have accepted, probably unknowingly, the privatization of water treatment and delivery in so many USAmerican cities by the very same company and kinds of companies that the people of Bolivia ran out of their country. Bechtel, Thames, Suez, Vivendi and others operate quietly in so many cities in this "free country"and we don't even democratically realize that they are locking down access to life itself. Water activists and warriors (yes, water WARRIORS!) all over the world have warned us about them because they have fought them, seen the idiocy and tragedy of their ways of working and thinking, seen and felt the harsh reality of globalization and capitalism in places where it does not work, where it is killing and poisoning and sickening people day and night, robbing us, ALL OF US, of life and the simple hope that we might project ourselves safely, peacefully and consciously into a future where humanity, nature, life itself and the water that could guarantee them all is respected, protected and understood for its core and essential value.

In the Dagara indigenous spiritual and cultural tradition, water carries the energetic, the properties and gifts of observation and focus, of clarity, peace and unity. How can we continue to desacrate and disrespect AND waste the very naturo-spiritual element that carries these important energies and lessons for us at a historical and cultural time like this? How can we NOT listen to the Dagara as they implore us to protect that very element that will continue to secure our place as conscious, caring, compassionate, communal and living, breathing humans being on this earth? How can we sit here at our computers day after day, with access to all the intelligence and wisdom of many indigenous societal ways AND the burgeoning, though late awareness of modern science and political thought to the importance of our protection of this vital fluid?

How dare we spend our hours, our days and nights watching twisted surreality tv shows, (US)American idolatry, lost plane passengers and housewives turned desparate when there are documentaries like "Thirst", like "FLOW", like "Blue Gold: The Water Wars", stellar short films like "PUMZI" by Wanuri Kahiu, that point to us to the very clarity that will save our mortal lives and possibly preserve a humble place on the earth we've been moderno-maniacally raping for the past 150 or so years at the behest of and ignorant acquiescence to capitalist globalization!

There is no sane culture that disrespects water or complains about rain and the blessed offering and gift from Spirit and nature that that is. We would shake our heads at people who live around the dried up lake bed of Lake Chad in Africa if they dared waste a jug of water. We'd think them truly off their nut! But we send billions of gallons of water into fetid sewers and into chemical-laden plastic bottles, pour thousands upon thousands of gallons of pollution constantly into our rivers, poison our lakes and rivers with pesticides like Atrazine (outlawed in the very country that is home to the capitalist corporation that produces it!), piss billions of gallons of dangerous and damaging pharmaceutical chemicals from our bodies into the water systems of the world, rain down acid on the gentle, loving earth - and we don't see our own insanity??! Indigenous people who don't wear pants in the jungles of South America have soberly pointed us to our own aquatic and earthine pathologies - CORRECTLY! - and we marginalize their healing message because who wants to listen to a dude with red paint on his face that eats monkey meat that is telling us how we can stay alive on a troubled planet?

There is no insane culture that disrespects water, complains about rain and privatizes water that will last on this earth. Vandana Shiva has likened the rampant industrial-IMF/World Bank-age damming of rivers all over the earth to the blockage of the human arteries that cause heart-attacks. Modern anti-culture has brought the earth close and closer to a terrestrio-cardiac arrest. It has created a culture of blockage and commodification and desacration and servitude. It constantly destroys cultures and viewpoints of freedom, flow, true connection, harmony, sacredness and fair exchange. Ms. Shiva IS right. The no-pants, red-faced, monkey-eating, jungle-dwellers ARE right. Those documentaries and movies that get seen far too infrequently and far less widely than they should ARE right. Wanuri Kahiu’s science fiction-cum-science-non-fiction narrative IS right.

("PUMZI" still shot)

And I feel the madness, the insanity, see the sickness, the disease-state mind-set of the culture within which I live (in spite of). And I AM sick of the notion that we can't do better than this, that we are actually living in an advanced society because we wear pants and eat mystery-meat and have our women use poisonous chemicals to make them more beautiful. I am truly hurt, deeply hurt by the thought and functional knowing that we are but a simple mindset shift away from seeing our own collective spiritual pathology and that we seem to be making that shift, if we are making it at all, in such a dangerously and tragically slow manner...when we think we are so very, very advanced, smart, informed, educated, intelligent and entitled to our modern-cultural-arrogance.

My tears are made of the very water that sits atop Mount Kilimanjaro, less and less, though each year, receding with the changing of climate and scientific bullying of the global hydrological cycle. My sweat is made of the same water of the powerful, insistent Amazon river, encroached upon by petrochemical companies and falling trees for livestock grazing to feed the fast-food addiction of lipid-heavy westerners. My saliva churns with the retiring waters of the Colorado and Columbia rivers, diverted and sullied by dams and urban faucets whose owners never see the dwindling salmon runs or dry, disappearing deltas that flush our collective soul no more.

(from www.bechtel.com)

I am that water that Bechtel, Vivendi, Thames and Suez burns into thin air. I am that pacific ocean that thickens with plastics floating out of the sewers of Japan and California. I am that well that is drying up in the farmlands of India. I am the water, stilled and dying behind the dam nation of international capital's disease-state. I am the Oglala aquifer, dangerously low from mechanized, modern irrigation techniques. I am the 1% and decreasing supply of potable fresh water on the earth, our only home. I am dying because the society I live in has forgotten the very thing that gives it life and the very opportunity to have the strength to have the choice to destroy itself -



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