Friday, June 4, 2010

Cool water, life giver, life taker - Respect for life's blood.


I love old movies. I especially like old movies about treasure hunters and gangsters. And I have always been a little intrigued with the fascination of bathing in gold or cash. This has always seemed weird to me. I understand that it must fulfill some people’s desire to have enough money to bathe in but I never understood it. Never that is until recently. I am looking at things much differently since my neighbors well ran dry. I think I understand the desire to bathe in something rare and precious.
Have you ever realized that water is a very crucial and well mixed ingredient in the cake of our lives? I mean besides the fact that we can’t live without it and we are mostly comprised of it.
We are surrounded by it. We are literally baptized in it. Water is not the root of life; it is the stuff that that root feeds on and yet most modernized people don’t seem to have any respect for it. Well that’s sad. I believe the saying that: “Water unused returns in rain, water shared returns in grain, water wasted causes pain, and when waters poisoned we all are slain”.
This seems to be a silly saying from the old west, but we are all involved in this interesting yet simple prophesy. The best action to take is the simplest - be mindful. If we live in the moment then conservation becomes mandatory and waste becomes illogical. If I am brushing my teeth –Then the water doesn’t need to be turned on –when I rinse the toothbrush –I turn on the water. Logical
When we bottle it, it’s poisoned by plastics, when we defecate in it it’s poisoned by bacteria, when we mix it with chemicals like the common things we use to preserve food –it’s poisoned. When we mix it with chemical fertilizers -it’s poisoned. And now even rain is poisoned. I don’t like to think of my children’s future when I see some dumbass washing down the parking lot of the local Gas station. I can’t stand that water restrictions are only placed on residences –not on golf courses or huge factories that dump pollution as steam or drainage.
Water and air, we are mostly water and air and yet we continue to have such little respect for these things. My antagonists in this argument claim that I am just as much to blame as they are. In some ways I agree. But we live on a shallow well –that has forced us to look at everything we use water for as a drain on a quickly depleted resource. I collect rainwater, a lot of it, that we use for anything that doesn’t require it to be clean. I don’t fertilize with anything but compost. Quick showers, no washing the cars, Water efficient clothes and dish washing and when I can afford the expense we will have a grey water collection and filtration system.
There are many people who say I’m weird to go to this extreme. To them I say one day maybe they’ll change their mind. I can only hope that in the future kids won’t watch old movies about treasure hunters and gangsters, and wonder why the heck those people would want to bathe in that dirty stuff. After three days without it, clean water becomes the most valuable thing we could ever want. Where will you hide your treasure?

1 comment:

  1. Very true and its a quirk when it stops becoming 'conservation' as in a 'nice thing to do for the planet' when one is living in a place that you have to haul your own water to. I forget frequently. I have even stopped using paper towels-I use cloth- for 2 years now after i learned how much water is used to make them, then the act of cleaning up 'spilt' (read: wasted)water, then noticing how many paper towels I was going through--it seemed insane to me. Thanks for this post, Scott.

    ReplyDelete