Everything is water

A river is alive...

Photo by Mark McGregor on Unsplash

“Everything is water” is the first philosophical statement, attributed to Thales of Miletus, dating back to the 6th century BC. Everything comes from water.

This quote immediately brings to mind the excellent book of Elif Shafak “There are rivers in the sky”, in which she weaves together three beautiful stories that all have to do with water, rivers, and everything humans have done with them, from using them to abusing and damming them. The author is so concerned with the fate of rivers that she consistently moves me, including in her Substack stories.

“Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water.

Throughout human history, the fate of our rivers has consistently been one of pollution, serving as a collection point for waste, and being exploited as a source of energy, all without consideration for the destruction of the rich life in and around the rivers.

Reading this story immediately catapulted me to the Japanese philosopher/politician/conservationist Tanaka Shozo, who at the end of the 19th century vehemently opposed the pollution of the Watarase River by the Ashio copper mine. He committed a courageous act of resistance by attempting to deliver a letter to the Japanese emperor, in which he asked the emperor to protect his people from the pollution of the river, the landscape, and the agricultural land. The letter never reached the emperor. It could have resulted in Tanaka being sentenced to death. Tanaka Shozo undertook pilgrimages along rivers to gain a better understanding of them, and from this he developed his philosophy, which boiled down to the idea that we should think “with a river”. We had to learn to understand rivers before intervening in them — a philosophy developed 150 years ago. And still, in our “civilised” world, rivers continue to be polluted for ever greater economic gain. It hurts to know that so many rivers around the world are polluted, embanked, dammed, or hidden beneath cities, solely for the sake of humans, when rivers are living beings that have shaped our world. We have forgotten to learn to understand rivers.

Fortunately, there is more and more positive news to read about rivers, as more knowledge is being gained, space is being made for fish migration, and dams are being removed to allow salmon to once again have free passage to their spawning grounds. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about this in the chapter “Fire on Cascade Head” in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, a chapter that moved me deeply. And this year we welcomed Robert MacFarlane’s beautiful book Is a River Alive? I am already looking forward to immersing myself in his stories. On 12 September, there was a ‘Life in Conversation’ between Elif Shafak and Robert MacFarlane in London (Rivers of Life), organised by How to Academy. How I would have loved to have attended that conversation.

Rivers originate from water, that life-giving element that we so desperately need to be who we are.

All this to leap ‘Who am I’. Like a river, I have been shaped by the landscape of my life, by encounters, by touches, by a word, a glance, by friendships I shared, by love I found. Sometimes fleeting, sometimes longer lasting, but every encounter, every touch, every word changed who I was, who I became, subtly, often invisibly, but I changed and became who I am now. And I will also be different in the next moment, tomorrow, or next year - a different me, a different person I don’t know yet, but whom I am curious to meet.

I sometimes feel like a river, blocked, dammed, polluted by all the ugly things that happen in life, near or far, that do not leave me unmoved and make me hope, more than ever, that I too, like a river, can flow freely again.