Water Has Memory
Struggling to process the overwhelming transformations of his life, Olaf the magic snowman of Frozen 2, resorts to mindless recitation of strange facts of science and myth that he picked up from god knows where. If you’ve watched Frozen 2 more times than you care to count, the aphorisms appear in your consciousness at odd moments of life no different than ancient rabbinic teachings. “Did you know that turtles can breathe through their butts?” If you take the time to google his quotes you learn strange things. Some turtles actually do breathe through their butts, in winter hibernation cloacal respiration is their main form of oxygen.
More essential to the plot of the story though is this one – Olaf says, “Water has Memory.” In 1988, a French biologist specializing in immunology named Jacques Benveniste, published a paper in Nature demonstrating that water can retain memories of compounds even when diluted at a very high level. Homeopathists were thrilled by the validation, other scientists not so much. His experiment was not quite replicable, and the brouhaha has taken many turns. Nonetheless, in Frozen 2, Elsa is retracing the histories of an unresolved past that continues to call to her. At each of the reverberant places of her journey, she communes with the local waters that remember everything they once witnessed: the death of her parents, her grandfathers’ murder and deceit of the indigenous people of the land, her mother’s act of love that bridged worlds. With her magic and the capacities of water, she transmutes the lost images of the past into living ice sculptures for everyone to see. Water has memory.
The pop culture equivalent of Frozen amongst the demographic of naturalist literature enthusiasts is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Ten thousand people have asked if I’ve read it and until this summer I answered no. Staying at my friend Abby Paloma’s house as we transitioned to life upstate, it was living on her dining table like a bible and I couldn’t help myself, I got fifty pages into her copy and then bought my own so I could underline and fold down corners, the last book of a long summer reading list. I think the book has been devoured by the moment because of its rare vantage that brings worlds together. Kimmerere is a member of Potowatomi Nation and a professor of environmental biology, and the book weaves these two ways of knowing together, indigineous plant wisdom and natural science. There is an attitude in the culture now that says you’re not allowed to speak of anything outside your lane. But what we’re really yearning for is people who bring worlds together in strange unexpected ways, old forms crumbling, new ways of knowing emergent. In a divisive time the hunger for communion is ravenous.
She’s telling the story of trying to learn the language of her ancestors. The living speakers of potawatomi are few, and they are old. Where European languages often assign gender, Potowatomi does not. But it does distinguish animate from inanimate forms, living from nonliving things, and the living are addressed with entirely different language. But who decides what is living? Are the moths that I sucked up into my vacuum cleaner living? The mice in my mouse traps? Snakes, trees, grass, rocks, carrots, clouds, wind, strawberries, tobacco, sweetgrass, water? The subtleties of a culture’s language reveals its considerations.
“Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word – a verb, of course: ‘to be a Saturday.’ Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: ‘to be a hill,’ ‘to be red,’ ‘to be a long sandy stretch of beach,’ and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: ‘to be a bay.’ ‘Ridiculous!’ … And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing … In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too … Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things … this is the grammar of animacy” (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, pg. 55).
Later she is listening to rain make its way through the diversity of the leaves in a forest. She things she’s hearing things but the rain dripping from the hemlock sounds different than the rain of the maple.
“Shhhhh from rain, pitpitpit from hemlock, bloink from maple, and lastly popp of falling alder water. Alder drops make a slow music. It takes time for fine rain to traverse the scabrous rough surface of an alder leaf. The drops aren’t as big as maple drops, not enough to splash, but the popp ripples the surface and sends out concentric rings. I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain … Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, pg. 299).
The moment in which we find ourselves, where the world teeters at the edge of destruction, where the lives of the poor and and the lives of those deemed less alive than others are already being destroyed – this moment was brought about by a type of thinking which sees the world as dead. Creatures, plants, animals, trees, all the variable formations of the substance of Earth, soil, clay, gold, coal, oil, these are all things to be used for the increase of the pleasure and capital of man, they’re never living, they’re never verbs. That consciousness, which still permeates us, is what’s causing the world’s destruction. And the world’s repair is dependent on old wisdoms whose annihilation was attempted. Healing dependence on the emergence within each of us, of a new consciousness, which recognizes the gifts of living beings in nearly all the communions of our day. The first sip of water upon waking in the morning, the coffee bean, the wheat, the sunlight, the air, the paper, the medicine, the bath, the beeswax candle, the golden ring, the avocados and the meat – each of these a gift, a sacrifice that will form the bodies of our children. Everything is alive, everywhere is the opportunity for communion.
The greatest teacher in this seismic shift in human consciousness will be water. Water is the substance of communion. Water is the blood and drink of every life on Earth, willow, catalpa, mosquito, ocean, child, it doesn’t matter. Water is forming canyons and swimming in the bellies of whales. The water of the kettle ponds of Cape Cod that are forming the first water memories of my daughters, where have these waters been before? What tranquility, what sorrows, what visions and depths have they known. Water has memory, and each time I drink and bathe I am offered a lesson in the animacy of all the life forms to whom that water gave life before me.
Rabbi Yudah bar Ilai said, the Tree of Life was five hundred years wide and all the waters of creation gushed and streamed beneath it. Rabbi Yudan said in his name, that was not the end of it. Not only its boughs even its trunk was a five hundred year journey (Bereshit Rabbah 15:6)
I used to think that we were far from prayer, uncomfortable with its language and imagery. Now I see it everywhere. Prayer is all of the activities where we acknowledge the gifts of those beings that are giving us life. The acts where we hold the immensity of our being, the waters of our varied deep in stillness. Everywhere where the soul looks out from the pools of our eyes and sees a creature mirroring the gestures which continue in the realm of her deep unceasing.
Prayer becomes whole with the consciousness that the soul is always praying.. Does she not fly to be near her beloved (Song of Songs 8:5) without any break at all? It is only that, in the time of active prayer, the soul’s ceaseless prayer is actively revealed. And this is her joy and pleasure, the splendor and beauty of prayer, which is like a rose that opens its petals to meet the dew or the rays of the sun which appear on her in light. “Oh, that one would pray all day long!” (Berachot 21a) (Rav Kook, Olat Reiyah)
Prayer is the means to overcome that we’ve forgotten that a part of us is always praying. Prayer is the recognition of the lack by which we enter the sanctuary. We enter through prayer and go out through communion. This is the choreography of that process. We return to animacy and gift consciousness. We remember that all the goodness of our lives is a gift received from other living beings, it’s not ours. Our breath our love our family our sustenance, gifts. Our lifeforce, our name, our who am I - does not belong to us. In prayer we remember, and we return the gift. We pour back what’s been given to us, the beauties and the wounds. When we’ve poured and poured, in that state we meet an emptiness that paradoxically, is the very thing that can fill us up with God. When we empty of ourselves, kenosis, God cannot help but rush to fill us up. In through prayer, out through communion.