FRESHWATER

by ene ijato - September 23, 2018

PERSONAL

Water does not resist, it flows. Follow freshwater, it will heal you.

It is easy for me to be opinionated. I’ve always had my opinions, always consulted myself like an oracle speaking for god in a bag of skin. But I do not liken myself to a god, I do not liken humans to gods. Being a god does not lie in the sole ability of possessing a knowledgeably superior consciousness when compared to our limited knowledge of existential companions. Neither does it lie in our ability to be creators.

There’s sometimes a futility that comes with unanswered questions. Why does the universe exist? What is its purpose? Questions that seem like going in and out of an open door, trying to understand and search for meaning in the ordinary things. The things we can see, and touch and hold.

Time is a convoluted thing really. don’t you think? We exist within it and quantify our lives on its measure. The dimensions of the love, pain, angst, tragedy, joy, success, experiences and etcetera we get to live through are all embedded in it like markings on an infinite stretch of paper.

Sometime back I remember a friend telling me that time seems to be running out on us and yet she was utterly confused as to what existence really embodied. She looked at me, as if asking me the same question. I wondered in that instant about my memories, about all the moments of sadness, anger, pain, love and successes and how in that very moment they were all but memories. And I felt a persistent dull ache of sadness peppering this whole experience. A sadness I later understood to be sewn into the underlying fabric of existence, of existing in a world like ours. One full of so much and somehow so little. Because whether we acknowledge it or not, we are a collective. Whether we acknowledge it or not, as long as there is sadness in one life, this sadness is in our existence. As long as there is pain in a life, this pain is in our existence.

Sitting and listening to water, the way it flows, the motion it makes, the delicate drama it creates, in an infinitesimal moment of time, I feel like I live within it. I feel like I understand a spiritual essence of my being. Of flowing and healing and carrying. It says to me, in stirring sonorous whispers layered in the wispy air, 'Water does not resist, it flows. Follow freshwater, it will heal you.'