Water is
Liquid liveliness
On the surface
So abundant
Yet its unique
Properties for gotten
Pre-sumptuously owin’
The establishment
Of hour get-up and go
Taken
For granite
In difference to animating schemas
And listless graces
Making passable
Setting in motion
The commencement of
Every unfinished sentience
In ungraduated wisdom
Wading fore
A singularly strange sappiness
Perfectly suited too
The fluidity of life
A veritable firmament
Unearth
Melting arts
Unequalled
In the eyes sickle
Of all that is mined
And how to trust awe that won thaw
And whose falter
A mist
Viscous rumors
Holding heat
And reflecting lightly
Upon a painful temp
Such is life
Nigh and lo
Knot becoming
More dense
When faced with extreme code
Mysteriously arising
Unfathom-ably
Too lie on the surface
An enigmatic float
In a provocative parade
Of ineluctable chemistry
Dis solving orthodoxy
Putting a damper on bottom-feeding doctrines
And brown-nosing pax
Getting over simplifications
For what we moist dew
To reach
The molting point
A decidedly impossible sublimation
From solid to ethereal
Buy passing juicy rationalizations
To eternal quest in
So wet behind the years
De-man-ing an evolution
From unsurvivable fits
And try cycles
Spoke like a child
Turning around
Agin and agin
In a dizzying dis play
A baby threw out
With the bathwater
To except that
God reigns
On the just and unjust
As many will refuse
To fall
For such
A succor punch
A luscious liquidity
In which offed times
Wee can’t seam to a fiord
This poem is an ode to water. Water is one of the most familiar substances on earth, covering approximately 3/4 of the earth’s surface. Yet, water, one of the most chemically simple compounds, behaves very strangely, differently than predicted from its chemical structure. Water doesn’t behave like other fluids; in fact, compared to similarly sized molecules, water should be a gas at room temperature. Water, unlike most liquids, gets less dense when it freezes, causing it to float. Water is sometimes referred to as the universal solvent because such a wide variety of compounds are able to dissolve in it and it is the most common chemical solvent on the planet. The presence of these and other mysterious characteristics of water make life possible on earth.
As a scientist and a poet, I find water is a powerful metaphor for the mysteries and nature of life. How is it that such a common, even mundane, substance incarnate such an incalculably improbable set of chemical characteristics that makes life possible? Through science, humans have made incredible discoveries about how our universe works. Still, scientists must stand silent in answering how life originated, or why life exists. Life exists; this we know. Answering why life exists transcends science. Scientist are often like fish in a sea of meaning who are not simply blind to meaning but must willfully and ideologically ignore its claim on them; this is popularly called being objective.
In Buddhist tradition, creation stories are not considered that important because they consider how we got into our problems as much less important than how we get out of them. This seems to be a very practical approach, if perhaps a little incurious. Scientists share this practicality. Nonetheless, nothing is even a problem unless we are functioning in a world infused with meaning. Where does meaning come from? This strikes me as essentially the same question as where does life come from. Buddhism incorporates meaning into its practices based on the direct observation of mind, where there is thousands of years of agreed upon coherency forming the tradition, of which participants are invited to confirm for themselves. While many of the truths of Buddhism have been confirmed by science, the defining truths related to meaning can only be confirmed (or denied) though direct personal experience. Such “facts” lie outside the purview of science.
Science helps us accurately define the if-then conditions of the world — if this happens, then that will follow. Strangely though, as fish in a sea of ifs, scientist cannot or will not see that the defining nature of humans rests in choosing one course of action over another, which resides in a world of meaning, something/somewhere transcendent of the causal chain of events that science works to describe. If remains an eternal hypothesis which science cannot test. Scientists can study Buddhists, but they can’t study Buddhism with science — at least not the reductionistic science favored in Western cultures. The practicality shared by Buddhism and science is a commitment to rigorous observation. Buddhism points its rigorous observation to inner as well as outer life. Science limits itself to the outer world; the inner world is off-limits. The inner world of meaning and choice is willfully ignored, sometimes simply assumed to be irrelevant, or worse yet, denied to even exist. The inner world may be mysterious and elusive, but its secrets are definitely much less likely to experienced if one isn’t even looking there.
Philosophical ponderings and panderings aside, contentions between religion and science, physics and metaphysics, lie in misunderstandings in each respective realm of inquiry. We are served by scientific literacy and its delineation of many useful facts. We are served by fluency in our inner life and exploring the humanity of others. And still, the realm of meaning begs our attention and intention: who, or what, shall you serve?
