Page 15 - ECOlogic Book

point of wisdom and hence the medium whereby wisdom is made available
to living organisms. Water’s flow constantly links life and death. It is the
mediator between the two, and its surface provides a common frontier in
nature where they meet. Death is continuously being overcome there.”

John Hay recognizes our spiritual connection to Earth through water when he
writes in the Immortal Journey, “There are occasions when you can hear the
mysterious language of the earth, in water, or coming through the trees,
emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil,
but you have to be willing to wait and receive.”

Thomas Merton was certainly willing to wait and receive when he wrote in
his journal: “Think of it, all that speech pouring down, selling nothing,
judging nobody . . . What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest,
at night, cherished by this wonderful, intelligible, perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself
all over the ridges . . . Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will
talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.”

The identification is carried further by Richard Nelson as he imagines
himself, “transformed back to the rain from which I came. My hair,” he
says, “is a wispy, wind-torn cloud. My eyes are rain-water ponds, glistening
with tears. My mind is sometimes a clear pool, sometimes an impenetrable
bank of fog. My heart is a thunderstorm, shot through with lightning and
noise, pumping the flood of rainwater that surges inside my veins. My
breath is the misty wind, whispering and soft one moment, laughing and
5
raucous another. I am a man made of rain.”

He too, recognizes that water exists somewhere between matter and spirit,
life and death, as he, like Merton, listens to the mysterious language of
water: “During the quite between squalls, heavy droplets thump without
rhythm from the high boughs. These two sounds epitomize the twin
personalities of water – gentle or powerful, peaceful or tempestuous, life-
6
sustaining or life-threatening.

So here we stand, us Michiganders, poised on a peninsula surrounded by
and interlaced with that most precious and spiritual of elements, water; that
which connects heaven and earth.

5
Nelson, Richard, the Island Within, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1989).
6 Ibid.

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