Smart Water

Water has intelligence. As novelist Tom Robbins explained in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, water originally designed humans, composed of 65% H2O, as receptacles to carry it world-wide. Mankind finds itself in the throes of a pandemic, spread by droplets of fluid that have reached across the globe like a viral tsunami. Daily, people of every age and race prove their efficiency as pathogen wet nurses, making this theory sound plausible. Water as a clever god has ancient roots.

Honored by the early Greeks, Gaia, our primal mother Earth with all her fresh waters, and Poseidon, god of the seas, ruled over people. The Greeks understood their correct position in relationship to omnipotent nature.

Even in our secular modern era, we acknowledge water’s power. In the Star Trek, The Next Generation television series, aliens communicate with Captain Pickard using their label for humans, “Ugly Bags of Water,” a name Commander Data points out is technically accurate. Dr. Masau Emoto, a Japanese researcher, finds that water reacts to human consciousness. In response to beautiful words, music or pictures, water forms harmonic, exquisite crystals. After exposure to pollution or Hard Rock noise, misshapen blobs emerge when frozen.

With their large brains, humans claim to be at the top of the food chain, to be the smartest creatures on earth, as evaluated by themselves. And yet a brainless virus apparently signed a transportation contract with water and now brings our entire social order to its knees, killing almost two hundred thousand within a few months.

The virus piggybacks on us as we travel on our extensive networks via airplanes, trains, and buses. It congregates with us in convention centers, stadiums, schools and office buildings. Prior to the pandemic, we felt safe on public transport and in large buildings, smug in our dominion over nature, traveling faster than we could run or sitting in a climate-controlled room. We usually limit our fear to a nutty member of our own species who might suddenly attack. Currently, in public places, as we spew droplets on each other, the virus finds heaven in the watery medium between us which links millions of humans around the world. Hitchhiking on invisible splatter, covid19 finds new hosts and replicates to an unimaginable degree.

Who’s the smart one now?  Perhaps we should sign a peace treaty with Gaia and Poseidon. Or we might form a new contemporary spiritual belief in hydro-theology, a word my brother, a water engineer, uses to describe his personal relationship with his beloved life study. If we humbly acknowledge our dependency on the great liquefied realm around us and concede its superiority, perhaps we can come into alignment with nature’s reality. Her forces are smarter than us and infinitely more powerful. Maybe playing sweet music to all the water on earth might engender the gods’ sympathy for weak humanity. Perhaps Gaia, Poseidon or the hydro-theology spirits won’t sign the next virus contract that comes across their desk.

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