Free-flowing living water

Photo by Megan Lindow

Dear friends,

I took this photo as I was experiencing a moment of wonder at the deep, strange and sweet music of living water, tumbling wild and free down the mountainside. I felt as though the stream was enveloping me in its powerful, living presence.

Listening to the clear, ringing sounds of the water splashing over rocks and falling into deep pools, I felt like I was hearing a secret, wild language — speaking to me out of geological time.

The power of water runs deep in our mythologies. Ancient creation stories from around the world speak to the primordial, elemental mystery of water. Not only is it an essential element of life, but it holds the deep mysteries of our origins. Life begins in water. Water holds secrets far beyond the depths of our understanding.

In some mythologies, the world began in the vast, marshy uniformity of salt water. It was the medium through which life emerged.

Salty or sweet, marshy or fresh and pure, water is a shape-shifter that is always cycling within us and around us, often invisibly. In liquid form it is wild and willed. Over time it wears smooth the most stubborn formations of rock. It speaks in soft, musical whispers or in raging, deafening torrents. As vapour, it travels in sky rivers over vast distances to fall as rain on mountains and plains of other continents. One way or another, water makes its presence felt in powerful and in subtle ways.

The power of water seeps into our metaphors also. Our lives, when filled with meaning and connection, meander and cascade and tumble like rivers. When we are stuck or blocked, our lives become stagnant. In grief or in rage, we weep in flooding torrents.

In the ancient practice of Qigong, I recently learned, the meridians threading through the body are seen as internal riverbeds, circulating the life force (Qi) within us, drawn from the energies of heaven and earth. Just as water gets drawn up into clouds, falls on the mountains and gathers through the forces of attraction and gravity to course and tumble over the contours of the land, until it merges back within the vast ocean.

Trees, like humans, are upright beings. Their bodies serve as living conveyors of water, as tree roots force their way through rock, opening cracks though which fresh underground water bubbles forth. Drinking from deep underground springs, trees cycle water releasing it into the atmosphere through the respiration of leaves. The collective breath of great (and critically endangered) forests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin helps regulate the climate of the planet. Water cycles through oceans and skies, a continuous movement of patterns circulating within larger patterns, expressing the unity of a living earth.

Recently, in Allan Kaplan’s book Artists of the Invisible, I came across this passage quoting Theodor Schwenk:

‘Wherever water appears it tends to take on a spherical form. It envelopes the whole sphere of the earth, enclosing every object in a thin film. Falling as a drop, water oscillates about the form of a sphere… A sphere is a totality, a whole, and water will always attempt to form an organic whole by joining what is divided and uniting it in circulation. It is not possible to speak of the beginning or end of a circulatory system; everything is inwardly related and reciprocally connected.’

In the city bowl of Cape Town, where I live, the approach of summer brings a powerful phenomenon known as the Table Cloth. As I write this, the wind is pumping. I can look up out my window and see thick clouds streaming over the top of Table Mountain, creating a dramatic effect that you can see in this time-lapsed video by Eric Nathan:

As clouds are drawn upwards to meet the cold mountain air, they strike the rock and roll over the mountain condensing into water, before they cascade over the flat top and dissipate, meeting the warmer air of the City Bowl. Incredibly, it seems the Table Cloth provides more moisture to the plants on the mountain than do the winter rains. Cloud moisture revitalises the native fynbos plant life through the hot, dry summer months. It seeps into the ground and percolates through the rock to replenish the groundwater which bubbles up through the mountain’s natural springs.

This natural river system of some 36 tributaries and springs around Table Mountain sustained life in this place for thousands of years. Cape Town, as the city of today is called, also bears the more ancient name of Camissa — ǁkhamis sa meaning ‘sweet water for all’ in Kora the Khoe language of the indigenous people of this place (Camissa Museum).

When the Dutch dropped anchor in Table Bay in 1652, this abundance of year-round fresh water was what enabled the Dutch East India Company to establish a way station to supply fresh produce and water to the ships plying the trade routes between East Africa, India and East Asia. Thus the waters of Camissa helped give rise to a burgeoning colonial empire and the histories of slavery, colonization, globalization that followed. As the city grew, the natural living waters were steadily encased in concrete below ground, and forgotten.

It is a story powerfully and poignantly glimpsed in this short video from 2016:

The views expressed in the film were prescient: it was made shortly before the region endured a catastrophic drought in 2017 and 2018, and Cape Town’s municipal water supply nearly ran out — even as its hidden urban rivers continued to seep and flow beneath the concrete. At the time, I published this piece looking at the complex dynamics of the water crisis in light of social inequality and fractured societal relationships to water.

These days many of us live in cities threaded through with lost creeks submerged underground. With the water relationships that sustain our lives out of sight, many of us have internalized dangerous myths about water: we take water for granted. We think we can use it or pollute it or dump garbage in it without a thought. We think we can manage and control it through our infrastructure. We reduce it to being just a sterile ‘resource’. As Allan Kaplan writes:

‘Those of us who have access to mountains and wilderness recognise immediately the difference between ‘living’ water and ‘dead’ water. The water flowing from our taps in the cities, or through concrete canals, while it may be clean, is lifeless and dull. On the other hand, water flowing freely in the mountains, bubbling and gurgling from rock to rock, is alive and joyous and full of vitality. The point is that if we approach water with a childlike wonder, with poetic intuition, if we do not try to reduce and explain but rather plunge ourselves into looking without prejudice, then we can see for ourselves the difference between living water and dead water. Chemical analysis will not detect this difference, but our own sensibility needs no such analysis. Reading water in this way, we can begin to understand the importance, for living process, of its free-flowing nature.’

During the drought in Cape Town, many people in the city remembered the hidden springs, the wild and ancient life blood of this place. People gathered at communal taps and fountains to fill their buckets with wild mountain spring water. Some heard the sweet music of the wild mountain streams running beneath the pavement, and imagined the possibilities of a different kind of relationship to water.

As writes Erica Gies, author of the recently published book Water Always Wins:

‘Secret rivers, ghost streams, hidden creeks: learning of their existence arouses our innate attraction to mystery and our passion about the places we live. What we learn about the past triggers amazement because our quotidian landscape is so transformed. We’ve dramatically altered waterways outside of cities too. We’ve straightened rivers’ meanders for shipping, uncurled creeks to speed water away, drained and filled wetlands and lakes, and blocked off floodplains to create more farmland or real estate for buildings…

‘When our attempts to control water fail, we are reminded that water has its own agenda, a life of its own. Water finds its chosen path through a landscape, molding it and being directed in turn. It has relationships with rocks and soil, plants and animals, from microbes to mammals like beavers and humans. Today, water is revealing its true nature increasingly often, as climate change brings more frequent and severe droughts and floods…

‘Figuring out what water wants — and accommodating its desires within our human landscapes — is now a crucial survival strategy.’

Indeed, water is revealing itself as a life force that will not be controlled. So what if we truly respected the powers of free-flowing living water, and organised our communities and lives accordingly? It may sound like a distant, idealistic vision — but Gies’s stories from around the world give a glimpse of what is possible¹.

I’ve also been following (intermittently, though with great interest) the work of Joe Brewer and a wider community in Barichara, Colombia who have been working towards ecological learning and land regeneration at the territorial scale.

This vision maps the planet not according to its nation-states, but as interlinking terrestrial ecosystems, otherwise known as ‘bioregions’ which are essentially watersheds. The approach emulates an ancient way of life, shaped by the movements of water across the natural terrain, as it flows from mountains to the sea. The idea is that flows of living water through the landscape shape its ecology, which in turn gives shape to peoples’ lives, livelihoods and cultures.

In his book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, Brewer draws on the principle of autopoiesis, coined by Chilean philosophers and scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s to describe the patterns through which living organisms continuously ‘self-generate’ and ‘self-regenerate’. Merriam-Webster defines autopoiesis as ‘the property of a living system (such as a bacterial cell or a multicellular organism) that allows it to maintain and renew itself by regulating its composition and conserving its boundaries.’ As Brewer observes, autopoiesis works at the levels of the body and the bioregion. Just as the body circulates energy and nutrients to its cells and maintains its internal conditions in balance to keep itself alive, he writes:

‘It was a natural extension to see that territorial regeneration occurs at the level of functional landscapes, which have structured ecological flows organized around the physical aspects of rivers and mountains, coastal estuaries, and rock substrates. Information flows at landscape scales to achieve the analog of autopoiesis for entire ecosystems. These functional landscapes are the organizing principles for regeneration to occur at whole-system scales. The orchestra of interdependent life that springs forth within them has network flows and emergent properties similar to the patterns of bodies that have minds flowing through them.’

When essential parts of these living systems are blocked or destroyed (by deforestation, damming rivers, dredging coastal estuaries, channeling natural creeks, etc.) the intricate processes of ‘self-production’ are impaired and there is ecological breakdown. Describing the territory of Barichara in the northern Andes where he now lives and works, scarred by the legacies of ecological destruction and fragmentation left by 500 years of colonial empire and extractive farming on privatized land, Brewer further writes:

‘As the tropical dry forest was destroyed, it left behind exposed clay and dried-up stream beds. The Barichara River running across this plateau historically had about 15 tributaries that carried water through the forest canopy and its underground root systems. Each year during the dry season, this water was stored in the forest ecosystem and continuously cycled until the next annual wet season. Now that the forest is gone, the water runs off in gushes. It carries most of the remaining soil with it. The riverbeds are dry across all of these tributaries except for about an hour at a time during the occasional thunderstorm.

‘There is no way to bring the Barichara River back to life on a single plot of land. Even the most skillful permaculture practitioner on a five-acre farm cannot rejuvenate the flow of clean water. Only an effort organized around the entire watershed holds the potential to do this — if it can be done at all…’

Perhaps much of the work of being human today, both joyous and deeply challenging, hinges on us restoring our relationship with water, the ‘life blood’ of all living organisms and of the land itself. Just as water holds the deep mysteries of our origins, I believe the qualities of our relationship to water will define essential parts of our future stories. Can we learn to respect what water wants, and live accordingly? Can we organise ourselves towards restoring the natural flows of water and regenerating what has been destroyed? Can we allow the free-flowing wildness of living water to course and tumble and flow within us?

This week I am looking more deeply at my own relationship with water. I am listening for the music of sweet, wild, free-flowing, living water — on the mountain, below the city concrete, at the sea shore. I give thanks for the wild joy and life it makes possible. I am reminded of how much work there is to do, to restore the ecological flows of life that make our own lives possible.

With love,

Megan

1. Alas, I’ve only had a chance to read a couple of chapters, but it’s a beautiful and insightful work that I’m excited to read to completion!