thoughts on the universal solvent

my four year old son asked me yesterday…’is water a thing?’  i explained to him that it certainly is, but that it takes several forms… when it’s liquid you can hold it.  but only to a point.  eventually it will leak out of your hands and flow onto whatever is beneath.  it will become a temporary stain or puddle.  might even freeze and become dangerous. maybe it will be a cool drink for an insect or cat…  and will almost magically disappear soon thereafter.

i then pointed to the clouds passing by overhead… ‘that’s water too!’ i said.  in fact, as we looked around us it occurred to me that this water (this ‘thing’) is literally everywhere.. i’m mostly water, the trees are largely water… the air itself.. full of water.  we’re made of it.  we’re surrounded by it.  our skin is made clean by it.   if we don’t drink it everyday, we’re dead.  whole societies and cities across history exist where they exist because of the presence this ‘thing’.  

i thank God for his elegance.  playfulness even.  what we tend to think of as universal, obvious, observable and elemental was literally (i believe) spoken into being at some long ago point.  

might our life experience be a bit like watching some kind of modern performance art?   you know the type… a crazy ‘out there’ artist doing something alarmingly mundane or pedestrian.  just repetitively.  straight faced.  in a white washed room.  we arrive at the gallery, fancily dressed.  we’ve paid the suggested donation and assume we’ve earned the right to criticize all that we see.  ‘i could have thought of that’, i whisper to a friend.   what i observe on display is so frustratingly simple, obvious, elemental.  somehow even offensive.

but we didn’t think of it.  we didn’t think of water in any of its three forms.  we didn’t think of any of this.  

maybe the artist is silent.  she’s content to get the point across, no matter how polarizing the reviews.  no matter whether people stand in awe or scoff.  time will reveal the fullness and worth of her strange yet beautiful pursuits.

-eric