Though this newsletter is called The Climate According to Life, it could also be called The Climate According to Water. As described in a previous post, the Lakota say mni wiconi, meaning water is life, suggesting the two are so interrelated as to be part of the same mystery. Suggesting also that there are geographies to that mystery where science cannot reach, where the tools get in the way.
My last post, The Earth is Not a Person Sleeping, approached water in a scientific manner, arriving at a mechanical metaphor, water cycle as heat pump. The next post concerning where the heat goes once the pump has released it, will do the same, arriving at another mechanical metaphor, that of a radiator. There’s nothing necessarily bad about using mechanical metaphors for living systems, provided it’s understood.
But here I want to attend to the mystery, to simply admire it.
HER AND HERS
She never leaves herself only changes form. Clouds are a fruiting of her body the soil-sea below, her womb from which she rises invisible, vaporous when she isn’t falling clear and cold. Her name is Water. She is Life. She has a song called atmosphere which is also her opera house a room she makes by being. She holds it in her round arms and turns toward return and in the moment she arrives turns away again. It is for yearning, she says, the turning, and if ever I stop the music ends.
Thank you for taking the time to read this work. I appreciate it.
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exquisite poem, in that it is so modest and alive. thank you (again), Rob.