Common Treasures: WATER IN MOTION

She keeps moving, always moving in so many ways… the water, the water of life. Even when it seems completely static, is moving, assuming new shapes, dimensions and colors, purposes, ways of being water.

The Ancient Greeks identified the flowing waters of a river with the flowing of time and life. River Lethe (Letes), one of the rivers of Hades, was the river of oblivion; its flowing was the image of the irreversible passage of time and crossing it to the other side was the symbolic representation of the passage from life to death. It was necessary to cross the river of time, the one that fabricates memories and oblivion, to depart from life… probably as immaculate and pure as a newborn, without wishes for the future and no memories of the past. The crossing itself consisted mainly in drinking water from Lethe to forget all the life behind… So, dying is forgetting… and when you forget you die… I prefer a myth where dying is remembering, everything, without blanks, or cuts or missing pieces… I prefer a myth where water is life, truth and memory… even if you die drinking, walking along, over or across…

Now let’s complete the open myth and add a few meta-facts and meta-symbols. The myth talks about rivers, water flowing in a single and irreversible direction… not about water itself. That could only be a sad story of endless loss, the kind of experience synthesized in aphorisms like «You can’t bath twice in the same water» or «In the same river we get and do not get in, we are and we are not» (Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535 BC – 475 BC)

From the peaceful banks of Alethea, I watch Lethe. I watch, I sail, I cross but I don’t drink. I only drink from the pure and inexhaustible sources of Alethea. Truth and reality are dancing by the pure water. They once lived by the Lethe. They drank its water and crossed its waters and followed its course in search of an endless, beautiful sea… But the days, the years, the centuries and millennia passed and they did not get to the mouth of that endless river. There was no end and there was no ocean. It was a long way back, but they came back to the fields of their beginning, the only place where they really belonged together, truth and reality. No oblivion here, only revelation, sun after sun, moon after moon…

The trees and the grass were still there, deeply rooted on the ground, new roots in the same eternal ground. Each new Spring new birds came, generation after generation, to live in the same eternal nest. Drop after drop, the dew of the stars joined the breathing of all the living creatures, before travelling to the same eternal clouds… and rain, rain copiously in the morning cups of all human beings. Some used to drink each cup each morning as if it was the first and last, cup and morning… all along their lives, the first and the last each day. Other forgot many times to drink their morning cup of new life. And some others never drank their cup at all.

In the banks of Alethea, I’m happy for revisiting the primordial light and life in all the new things around, unbreakable links with the distance, the unknown, the infinity of our souls. I recognize each leaf of each tree, though they are others and new. I recognize each blood vein of each leaf, though there’s now much more millions of leaves than there were then. I recognize each drop of rain and each sunbeam, dancing crystals falling softly in the abyss of the sea, the sky and Mother Earth heart. I recognize the same eternal sparkle in the old eyes of the new bird…

After many thousands of days and nights living on the borders of Lethe, away from Alethea, it’s good to be back. Since I recognize everything, nothing is lost. Here I really can drink twice, endless times, from the same perpetually new water, for the water is only one and the same. I can enter into and get out exactly from the same drop of water and fall in the abyss while I fly across the most deep blue sky. I can drink, breathe, bath in the new primordial light of each day, for the light is only one and the same. Here I am completely true and real, here I am and am not at the same time… Be and be not! What a perfect way of being…

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Note 1: Alethea is one of the rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. Etymologically the word means “truth”, “supreme truth”, “reality”.

Note 2: The photographs below were taken at Hotel Arribas, Praia Grande, Sintra, Portugal in three different days of the beginning of September; one was very sunny, other was quite cloudy and in the other one the changed several times from cloudy to sunny and vice versa. That’s why the light is very different. In two of the days the sea was very rough and the waves beating against the hotel pool walls were gigantic.