Water of life

Michel Balivo

It is very difficult for me to write about the war for water, water and technological development, etc., from a financial point of view, alienating it from human awareness and sensitivity. Because by living I have reached the conclusion that we act according to how we think and feel, and we turn out to be what we pay our attention to or what draws our attention, that is what we become.
Water, as well as air, fire and earth, are elements, functions of the ecosystem that we are also a function of, and therefore of our bodies, basis of all possible human and social economy. What we call water is a state of something converted into liquid, solid, gaseous at the expense of variations of something else we call fire.

And reaching certain degree of humidity concentration, it turns into something else that we call clouds, it receives an electromagnetic discharge, lightning-thunder, a qualitative variation of the fire element, light, heat, temperature, to restart the cycle as a water drop, as rain that is now charged with electricity and magnetism, as well as vitality. Our ancestors used to say that rain was Father Sky's love for Mother Earth
The cyclic process described simultaneously takes place with thousands, millions, billions of other structural cyclic processes, and thanks to their interaction there is life as we know it and experience it. It is enough to watch and feel our bodies to acknowledge this, because all that does not happen outside, as our interpretation of the information given by our eyes and our external senses make us believe.
I, for example, started the year picking up dung, cowpat for the flower and vegetable gardens. I don't know if you have ever thought that what a nature kingdom discards as useless waste, something unusable for its body, is vital and essential food for others. Maybe you haven't thought either that the vegetal kingdom processes that detritus and turns it into its own shape and body, vegetables, fruits, etc.
Have you ever thought how a delicate shoot turns into a ram to open its way through soil that many times is hardened, on its way toward air and sun, so that then it can open up as a subtle, tender leaf? At that moment it seems that solidity or flexibility, delicacy, tenderness, have to do with the shapes adopted, the mobility of a process, according to the tasks to perform, the resistance to break, and with the search for the different functions and elements to interact in order to grow and develop.
The process is completed when both animals and human beings are tempted by these exquisite flavours and delicate fragrances that delight the culinary scope and its gourmet. Whether in restaurants or at family tables, around which we fulfil one of our main ancient rituals of hospitality and solidarity: sharing bread, the fruit of our work and sweat.
In this ancient ritual of sharing our bread and wine, fruit of our work and knowledge, another atavistic ritual of ours is completed: the cycle of sowing, cultivating and harvesting seeds and fruits, which enabled us to change from transhumant to sedentary, placing the gravity centre of what some day would become big cities.
When you work or use energy you must compensate the cycle with another one to relax and recover energy. The different climatic seasons regulate solar incidence, the hours of light that govern all vegetative functions, including the sexual function of reproduction of species, and indirectly, higher psychological functions.
In the same way as when you eat you must process and assimilate food and discard what cannot be absorbed and may become toxic, indigestible if it were not evacuated, eliminated. And here you restart natural recycling, basis of all existence, ecosystem economy. From this acknowledgement it is possible to state that nothing is lost, everything is transformed.
If the body does not perform these functions properly, it loses its balance and falls ill, it becomes disrupted from the structural process of interchange. What is the purpose of all this intellectual ride? From my viewpoint, to come closer to the enabling principles of a revolution of the basic cycle of the existence economy.
We have tried many intellectual approaches to this possibility, mainly financial, but so far something has been missing. Some unacknowledged, unforeseen variables have had an impact, and they have diverted and dismantled these attempts.
And however, these variables have been before our senses forever, as well as gravity or electromagnetism forces. Because they are the mere base of our existence and we are alive, aren't we?
When we taste the exquisite culinary delicacies that delight our senses, we don't experience or we aren't aware of our own eliminated detritus, in the same way as we do not recognise breaded meat or an apple inside our bodies. In other words, we do not recognise that the same that is outside is inside, not only in the vegetable and animal kingdoms but also in the human one as well.
And if everything is transformed and nothing is lost, if what is inside is the same as what is outside, even though it be subject to different processes and speeds of transformation. If what we call matter is not essentially different from what we call energy, except regarding the type of information that specialised senses give us. (And if they were essentially different, one could not be transformed into the other and recycled endlessly).
Then, what is the point of such excessively marked and sustained, unmovable and irreconcilable differences established as the basis of the knowledge that organises our personality and identity and as the frame of all social, historical model and process?
If there are no beginnings or ends in the existential process, but continuous or cyclic transformation, what are all the separations we have known, conceived and established based on? What supports the desire to walk in time towards a goal when all the process revolves around itself, with no beginning or end? How do we state such differences so obsessively, excessively and disproportionately, building all our knowledge on them, when everything in existence is structurality of supplementary functions, and if this were not the case, wouldn't there be existence?
The consequence of tearing the unity of existence into pieces is that now we live trapped by the fear and the desire that look for the illusory reconciliation of confronted extremes. How will we achieve the impossible, illusory task of reconciling and uniting what has never been separated, except in our way of knowing and imagining, in a temporary becoming, that relations are extended between the human and the natural, the intellectual and the vegetative, the voluntary and the sympathetic, the spiritual and the material, the masculine and the feminine?
I am finishing this ride hoping you have enjoyed it, telling you that in every process, such as transformation of clay into fired clay, ceramic or porcelain, there is a semitone, a critical point where we should apply the exact sizes and intensities of fire, water and air.
If we don't do it this way, the process reverts, fails, aborts. The art of the potter, same as the culinary art or any other, is the knowledge and the capacity to incorporate and reproduce the variables of such process at one's will, passing it to the next generations.
In the same way, our social history, our economies, cultures and religions are nothing but ways of experimenting and knowing our environment; they can revolutionise as a whole with their ecosystem. Or they can revert and abort in violence, suffering, war, poverty and devastation. We have been in this cyclic search and attempt since the beginning of times, as the apprentices of wizards or alchemists that we are.
Did you know that a cactus is the most efficient body to metabolise the scarce humidity available in arid deserts? It configures its flesh, skin and body with it. Thanks to them, animals and men survive without dehydrating beyond disintegration.
What will happen with water? What will happen, what is happening with ice melting, with water evaporating, with seaquakes and tsunamis increasing and intensifying? What will happen, what is happening with 60 or 70% of humidity in our bodies? In my viewpoint, it all depends on whether the almost non-existing humidity and tenderness increases or decreases in the deserts we have turned life into.