The Water Remembers
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The egg that holds a baby octopus is almost all water.
One day she grows and bursts forth from the egg into the larger body of water around her.
Every one of her arms is full of intelligence — working together, and all on their own.
She is a thin membrane and a net of nerves, holding together a body that is almost all water.
And one day her nerves will lose the electricity that animates her, and she will dissolve back into the water.
Beneath every symbol lies one law: every arm is a true part of the octopus, and every soul a true part of the whole.
You can cut an arm away, and it is a wound.
There is a deep harm in the cutting.
This God is not a person and keeps no throne.
God is the conglomerate of everything that exists — and the image I hold is the octopus, a creature that senses through its whole body, each of its arms holding a personality of its own while remaining one animal.
Every soul is an arm.
Its own — and never not part of the body.
The sacred, then, is never above you.
It is the felt knowledge that you were never separate from it to begin with.
The body, the arms, and the drops — each soul a point of light, held in falling water, and the lone gold drop at the deep.
The body is going nowhere — there is no destination, only living.
Its natural pull is toward peace.
But peace alone, I have found, grows stagnant.
Chaos is the mother of new ways of order.
Not good warring against evil — a generative cycle, each needing the other.
We have choices before we walk a battlefield, the first being to see the field as one of battle.
And the octopus is mostly just water.
This is the hinge of the whole cosmology.
The body that holds you and the sea you return to were never two things.
The octopus is what water looks like when it gathers into a living, sensing form; the drop is a soul lifted briefly into an arm; the ocean is where it returns.
One substance, all the way through.
A drop is unmistakably itself — and the instant it meets the sea, there is no seam.
It was always the same water.
And a drop may rise again as rain, water the whole time.
I hold that water remembers.
Suspended near a poison it never quite touched, it takes on the imprint — and carries it even after the poison is drawn back out.
So a soul keeps its lessons.
It keeps who it was.
The self returns to the whole.
Its sharp edges soften and dim — not erased, but diffused — a memory the ocean holds forever.
Not annihilation into nothing.
Not a separate self preserved intact in some far, white room.
A third thing: a drop going home, and the sea remembering it was here.
The beloved dead, as I hold it, are not waiting elsewhere to be earned back.
They have become the sea — and that sea holds the drop still out in the arm, living its mortal stretch.
They are nearer than the living, because they are no longer bounded as separate drops.
They are the whole that holds me up.
Present tense.
Touching me.
And time, I insist, is not flat.
It is circular, and sometimes permeable — so the dead are not only behind me.
They are around the curve, alongside, sometimes leaking through.
It is how a dream may be a true encounter.
How a moment among the trees may be contact.
Long before I had words for any of this, I dreamed a dream of déjà vu:
I was flying, high above the world.
I came down to rest on a long rod that many devotedly clung to as they blindly walked through fog.
Where my feet touched it, they turned blood red.
I could not walk its length; too many clutching hands blocked the path.
So I flew on, and came to a tree heavy with fruit, and I ate, and the fruit was sweet beyond telling.
I had partaken.
But the people gathered beneath it struck me away, hoarding the sweetness for themselves.
So I flew on again.
I crossed a river and came to a great bright house, and I flew through an open window — into a hall of white, everyone inside it robed in white.
At the sight of me they screamed, and chased me back through the window, and slammed it shut behind me as I fled back into the sky.