Climate

The Fountainhead of Flow

Water is tightly woven into the everyday texture of life; yet many of us reside in an illusional universe where it is perceived as pedestrian, if noticed at all. The luxury of silence, of not knowing how nature works and water’s extraordinary place in it, is no longer possible.

The spurious fairytale that centred our naïve and careless relationship with water has set us on a perilous and tumultuous journey. Our once seemingly stable lands slip into flooded plains, seeping into thirsty, crackling deserts, inducing confusion, sadness and numbing hardship. Water is fickle now, we feel vulnerable as we can’t know when it will turn on us, flood us, bury us.

Yet, emerging are founts from which understanding may blossom and spaces for gentle acknowledgements of grief born out of climate trauma. With knowledge new dances with nature, dances for nature can flow.

The truth is that water was never quotidian. There have always been countless water tales to tell, tales about its interconnectedness to all aspects of the natural and built worlds, yet we have inattentively gazed elsewhere and told other stories. And now we unwittingly find ourselves in a time of crisis.

Our collective agency may mitigate the damage we have unknowingly or, perhaps in truth, uncaringly wrought; choreographing a more centred vision of the future. Fanciful theories of our mastery over nature are dead, as is our innocence. But we can dream together, we can cogitate and we can act, positioning our bodies and our minds in directions of romantic rains and lulling seas, allowing wisdom to reach us and us to share our thoughts and emotions through the body as each tells its off-kilter tale.