Water is an element that is more state than shape. And when it does take shape, it does so under other names: river or lake, sea, rain, fog or clouds... Novalis refers to it as “sensitive chaos”, responding directly to every outside influence. Its very adaptability makes it the ideal performer, always with something new to offer or, more accurately perhaps, like an underlying theme performed in constantly new variations. It is what makes its appearance both so exciting and so comforting. There is something hypnotic about water’s mobility, our consciousness switching imperceptibly from observation level to meta-level: from the image before me to the image within me. And as Laozi so fittingly found, it’s also why it’s ideally suited as a parable.
For Laozi, water’s flowing nature, moving along with each and every circumstance, comes to symbolise a wise way of life.
Water is impressive in its dynamics, yet impressionable in its nature. My experience of water in summer is entirely physically sensual. I feel my way into the lake, penetrating its surface which opens unresistingly, then closes about my arms in spiralling eddies. Now I push myself off from the lake bottom and glide into the horizontal, a surge of water folding over the skin of my back. And every time that same ecstatic moment of floating, gravity defied. The limitations of one’s own physicality now merely a vague notion. Each movement rolling on and on, spreading as I myself spread out, unendingly. Stillness, and tranquillity. And the certainty: I am all.
Übersetzung Stephen B.Grynwasser, Luzern/CH