"The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to." Ocean gazers and children splashing in bathtubs experience directly what Lao Tzu, in ancient China, felt in his bones. While physical and psycho therapy requires an investment of labor from both provider and patient, water works effortlessly, unasked, making no demands of us. Being in and around this liquid soul food balances and restores human beings.
At a recent philosophical roundtable discussion, an energetic participant asked why I mention water so often in both of my books. Unaware of my apparently instinctive references and intrigued that he had noticed their frequency, I had to think a bit. My answer: I think that it is the element most like us, inside and out. We are soaked in water internally and our senses relate to its powerful tug externally. Water sets human equilibrium and washes away our rough edges. "Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it." Lao Tzu knew.
In ancient Greece philosophers such as Thales, Lao Tzu's faraway contemporary, set the stage for the work of Plato and Aristotle. These "pre-Socratic" gurus shared a longing to know the origin of all things, "arche," the stuff of which reality is made. In a world of constant flux, what is the one thing that never changes and from which all comes and returns? Thales was quite the natural philosopher, predicting solstice and equinox, fascinated with the stars and the tides, air and mineral. There was but one universal source, however, and water, Thales insisted, is this essential reality. He sensed the capacity for growth that can be generated only in moisture and was captivated by water's supportive buoyancy. Critics pointed to the time he spent after falling into a well as the reason for his belief in water as the foundation of It All; Thales stayed afloat despite their doubts.
Think of the magnetic pull of moving water: The flow of river, creek, waterfall; the pattering sound of a fountain and rain on the roof; the swirl of water in a handheld glass; the whirling undercurrents created by diver or stone breaking the surface of a lake. When I welcomed children to a summer program on the college campus, one "activity" drew them far more than any other. A tiny pond, surrounded by stacked rocks nestled under a shady tree, was home to as many bodies as could squeeze together to see their faces reflected in water which fell slowly over the rocks and into the pond. A wet mirror for big smiles! Street hockey, art, philosophy, hiking, soccer, volleyball, poetry - they could all wait. The sound and sight of that gently recycling water was the place to be.
This past week I had the good fortune to spend a week with friends on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Tears rest on my eyelids every time I catch that first glimpse of the ocean. Walking along the beach knee deep in the surf seems meant to be; somehow this meshing strikes me as first rather than second nature. My senses pick up the beat of tumbling waves. They crash around me, spray their salty brew, and recede... without reference to me, yet rolling with my heartbeat. Calm and excitement coexist. Before going to the ocean I usually give Henry Beston's The Outermost House a quick scan in happy anticipation. This time these words from his "Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod" written in 1928 came alive: "The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied.... The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings...splashes...whispers.... It is also changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm.... The sonorous and universal sound....The rhythm of waves beats in the sea like a pulse in living flesh. It is pure force.... Countless vibrations precede the wave, countless vibrations follow after it. Night and day, age after age, so works the sea, with infinite variation obeying an unalterable rhythm." Yes. Universal. Pulse. Obeying.
I realized on this trip that the ocean does not offer me any answers; rather, its undulating repetition erases questions. How impudent that I even try to lay language on this magnificence! But these photos snapped by a fellow beachcomber take us quite close. Look. Imagine. And Pablo Neruda's soaring poem "The Wide Ocean" (from Canto General) salutes the "crystal completeness" of this big-bodied loveliness, its "proper purity" and, in Thales' spirit, its "Oneness." Neruda's poem brings us close to the ocean's edge while in our living rooms, as do the sections devoted to the ocean in the "Planet Earth" series.
The summertime child philosophers who so loved to see their faces looking back at them from the pond's slow movement never talked about why they liked to hang out at their special place. Rather than diminish their joy in an effort to verbalize the experience, I gave them an "assignment" you may like to try as well. Here are the instructions: Sketch with pencil on white paper your feelings when in water's presence without drawing any representation of water itself. I never asked to see their drawings. It was enough to see them, children beaten down by summer's heat and challenging circumstances, perched on rocks, lying in the grass, sitting on benches with pencils in hand: content, absorbed, settled...at peace.
