The liquid that descends from the clouds as rain, forms streams, lakes, and seas, and is a major constituent of all living matter and that when pure is an odorless, tasteless, very slightly compressible liquid oxide of hydrogen H2O which appears bluish in thick layers, freezes at 0° C and boils at 100° C, has a maximum density at 4° C and a high specific heat, is feebly ionized to hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, and is a poor conductor of electricity and a good solvent (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

On Sunday I spent a lot of time immersed. We have a beautiful oval-shaped pool in the back yard of the house we’ve been leasing for a couple of years, as well as a two-person hot tub. One of the best therapies for body, mind and spirit is to alternate between the frigid cold of the pool (we rarely heat it due to the cost and we’re not much into swimming) and the 103 degrees of the hot tub. By the end of 30-45 minutes of that you can melt right down onto the bed and sleep peacefully through the night. I felt like I needed an extra dose of hydrotherapy to ease some of the physical effects of travel and the still very present emotional effects of the passing of my father, so I took advantage of it being a quiet Sunday morning and dipped in and out of the warm and cold water, then wrapped myself in a cotton quilt a friend had brought me from India, sunk down onto the bed in our darkened guestroom and for the next two hours watched the film WATER, written and directed by Deepa Mehta.

 The film held me mesmerized. Set in India in 1938, but filmed in Sri Lanka after a public protest drove it from India, it is the story of an eight year-old girl who is widowed and then must live in seclusion and poverty with other widows, as society sees them as only “half-living” now that their husbands have died. There is great sorrow and great spirit in this film and such incredible beauty in the filming of it. The “ashram” where the women live is in a city on the banks of the Ganges, the Ganga—the Mother River, where Hindus bring the ashes of their dead and the devout make pilgrimage to bathe and cleanse their souls. I was absorbed into this film as a stream is merged with the river. It was a world so far away from my present-day reality and yet, the practices portrayed in the movie exist even today. I saw these women, as all women are — as water; fluid, ever-changing form, mercurial, emotional, powerful when provoked and as generous as the clouds that pour forth their bounty upon the earth. As everything is a teacher, so water is an endless source of wisdom, its lessons of compassion and of destruction always there to open us to the perfect rhythms of this world, as well as the vastness of its mysteries. Take a hot bath. Swim in the ocean. Drink long and slow from a pure mountain stream. Rent the movie WATER. Invite your loved one under the quilt with you. Let the tears roll. It’s so, so good for the soul.

Below are a few "water" poems written by women.

It was like a stream
   running into the dry bed
   of a lake,

               like rain
   pouring on plants
   parched to sticks.

It was like this world’s pleasure
   and the way to the other,
                                          both
   walking toward me.

Seeing the feet of the master,
O lord white as jasmine,
   I was made
   worthwhile.

Mahadeviyakka
tr. by A.K. Ramanujan
Women in Praise of the Sacred
HarperCollins, Publishers

FOREST LAKE

I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest’s pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart
a tiny drop ran down.

Edith Sodergran
tr. by Stina Katchadourian
Women in Praise of the Sacred
HarperCollins, Publishers

 
TO DRINK

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek –
it is the same –
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass;
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

Jane Hirshfield
Of Gravity & Angels
Wesleyan University Press

 
WATER PICTURE

In the pond in the park
all things are doubled:
Long buildings hang and
wriggle gently. Chimneys
are bent legs bouncing
on clouds below. A flag
wags like a fishhook
down there in the sky.

The arched stone bridge
is an eye, with underlid
in the water. In its lens
dip crinkled heads with hats
that don’t fall off. Dogs go by,
barking on their backs.
A baby, taken to feed the
ducks, dangles upside-down,
a pink balloon for a buoy.

Treetops deploy a haze of
cherry bloom for roots,
where birds coast belly-up
in the glass bowl of a hill;
from its bottom a bunch
of peanut-munching children
is suspended by their
sneakers, waveringly.

A swan, with twin necks
forming the figure 3,
steers between two dimpled
towers doubled. Fondly
hissing, she kisses herself,
and all the scene is troubled:
water-windows splinter,
tree-limbs tangle, the bridge
folds like a fan.

May Swenson,
Nature: Poems Old and New
Houghton Mifflin, Publisher