A warm sunny day called me outside…. being 8 months pregnant, I decided to go for a short
stroll….. I heard it before I saw it…. a happy babbling stream seemed to be asking me to stop
beside it and to keep it company….. Little leaves floated down on the surface of its fast
moving water; they stopped at stones jutting above the water, then, slowly but surely, the
little leaves turned around, seemingly by themselves, a few times and then continued floating
on down the river. Little unseen eddies in the water were at work. I drank from my bottle of
water and relished the life giving water, still looking at the movements of the leaves and
wondering at the cycle of water, the cycle of life….
I felt a little inward tremble as I felt my little baby turning in my womb, creating little ripples
in the fluid surrounding the little unseen limbs. All water, I thought…. Just then, I felt some
soft, warm raindrops on my face. Looking up at the largely blue sky, I saw that it was only a
passing shower. Water is everywhere I thought….as I watched the dampness slowly
evaporate off my raincoat. The dampness now in the air would soon form a cloud that would
rain down possibly on the roses blossoming in my aunt’s garden. The same rain that would
fall on the vegetables growing in thousands of Irish gardens…. and in Irish fields on the wheat
and barley used to make our bread and beer…. or rain that would fall anywhere else on earth.
My mind went back to the rain that nourishes the tropical rainforests of Brazil and Borneo …..
..the same water………
The water that was falling on me now was water that fell yesterday and the day before…..
and the day before that….. right back in time to before the time when dinosaurs roamed the
earth and even before that……… right back to when life first begun on earth, three and a half
billion years ago…..a billion years after the earth first formed…….
Water was there….the water that was in our ancient seas is now in our in rain… lakes and
seas……and combines with the energy from the sun …fuels the production of plants, our food,
and the lives of unimaginable numbers of life forms on earth. Water is in us. It is necessary
for our cells and our bodies to form. From our earliest days in the womb, we were
surrounded by water.
Like the leaf that I saw on the stream, we are carried by water.
And water flows through time and space.
There is no such thing as a local waterbody.
All water is global and timeless…….and it carries us.