Water

(Man can live without love but not without water)

 

“So let man consider of what he was created; he was created of gushing water issuing between the loins and the ribs.”

The Quar'an S.86:5-7

 

Water, an enigma, it defiles and purifies.

Not only are we made from water but of it.

Water, where life began, the great mother of us all,

it cleanses us of our father’s sins as well as our own.

From it the sun and all gods were created

It was from Re, the sun god's tears, that mankind was born.

It is odorless, tasteless and transparent.

One can not be immersed in it and emerge dry,

yet it leaves no evidence that it was ever there.

A natural paradox,

it is this substance, that makes life possible.

The very water that quenched the thirst of our first ancestors,

giving their body's substance,

courses through us, in their resurrected form,

and from us, our legacy, to our children and theirs.

In water we feel their strengths, weaknesses, hopes, fears,

in fact their very souls,

their sweat our sweat, blood of their blood, our tears theirs.

Its appearance, denoting our first sign of being,

is not its beginning or end,

but only a stopping point upon its eternal journey.

Its odyssey flows through the ages,

from the primordial rains that cooled the volcanic surface,

to the rivers of prehistoric lands,

where in billowing vapor, soaring over sandy shoals,

inland to the mountain crags,

it still falls filling the watersheds, giving new life,

and returning the old to its place of origin.

Seeping through cracks in rocks and dirt,

it filters downward to subterranean depths,

resurrecting through springs, creeks and rivers returning to be reborn from its mother's womb, the sea.

The immortal sea, is never, yet always, the same.

Its rhythmic breathing is reflected in its rising and ebbing tides.

In its transformation it leaves all impurities behind.

Water’s self cleansing nature and changing shape,

like the human spirit itself,

provides the directing forces that guides and changes lives.

In its angry, driven, tempestuous, white water rush

or its quiet, soft persistence,

it grinds mountains into canyons, soothing rocks to smoothness, and changes boulders into sand,

in a continual process of returning what is, to what was.

Heedless of all obstacles, it can not be held.

Escaping whatever attempts to grasp it.

Always seeking its own level, yet being lifted above it,

the great equalizer, in its unchangeable form changes all.

The same water drank by friend and foe alike is indifferent to rich or poor, good or evil,

bringing life and death, creation, destruction and salvation, perpetually baptizing us with our past.

Water the one thing that unites all that live and have lived.