Sunday, May 04, 2008 Essay: Amazing water By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
A FRIEND in a trip to interesting but out-of-the way European towns some years ago observed how water was not so easily available there. This confirms the fact mentioned in history about Europe mis-using and destroying its rivers, using them as a way to transport its growing industrial wastes to the sea, thus defiling them. In restaurants there, my friend had to ask for water, it wasn’t presumed to be served.
In the Philippines, there was a time when water from the tap would be the first thing the waiter served before he got your order. Today, there’s change in the local dine-out scene. Waiters don’t serve water although you have your glass, presumably for it. You ask for water and he asks in return, “Tap or mineral?”
In her travel in Europe, my friend noticed that the glass pre-set on the table wasn’t for water and the order that the waiter asked of was, “What’s your wine, madam?”
In the hostel she and her cousin took during the fascinating trip, she let the cousin use the bathroom first. When it was her turn, she realized that she had nothing but her cousin’s used water in the tub because the place served water (filled up the tub) only once a day. I’ve never read anything like this but this was a true experience of a
friend. It made her think twice about our better luck with life-giving water.
But if we don’t appreciate water, we might not deserve it.
There are places in the world where people don’t value water enough because there’s abundance of it. These are mostly locales away from cities and modern communities, nearer the natural source. They still have fresh, safe and untampered water, some “harvested” straight from nature without the touch of pipes, such as rainwater in places where the air is clean.
But in our modern societies, mis-use and waste of water could make it run out. Like food and rice, which we have to save on, we need to look at water twice.
Come to think of it, human fetus in the womb slides and swims in the mother’s fluid. The baby born is said to be 97 percent water, how else could it be invigorated but by what it’s made of?
Long ago, water was mostly “self-replenishing.” It’s said there are some isolated parts of India where small communities still drink water from “monsoon pits” which are better if more than what the neighboring village has built, as a sign that, according to local beliefs, they had “tamed the rains.”
In crowded, modern cities, the atmosphere could now be full of chemicals or microbes unhealthy for man. In such conditions, rain can’t be the distilled water that man used to get. Thus, people manage water, so to say. It’s forced out by modern equipment through pipes in the belly of the earth.
There are indigenous communities in far off lands which retain enduring trust of what water can do to heal or give life. They have more interesting ways to “manage” water, especially when it becomes difficult to procure from nature.
There’s a small village in Chile whose people thought of ways to get water after they ran out of it from the usual source. Using plastic mesh nets, they trap the fog which condenses into drops that run through gutters and pipes to the village. The “mist nets” give the people quality water.
Water is a fascinating, vitalizing gift of man. It even heals, say some researchers, like alternative medicine doctor Masaru Emoto in his interesting book “The Healing Power of Water.”
When you think of water as full of energy, like it was alive and kicking, you’d appreciate the way humans open up to it most naturally---in drinking, bathing, swimming. In a quick look at water in the Internet, I found the phrase “dynamic and chaotic” used again and again to describe its features. There are “curves and spirals” within water as it reacts to other molecules or to itself (even to thoughts, they say), depending on the atmosphere it has been brought in.
Scientists say water is made up of billions of fascinating structures, like crystals you can’t have enough of.
