Palace Of Water Poem by Denis Mair

After making their separate roundabout journeys through the Primordium, some of the wise ones meet in the Palace of Water. This is a concourse where the ancient intelligences like to hold peripatetic gatherings as they pass through. The vaulted spaces stir with sounds of purling rapids, with the boom of surf, with sighs of rain on foliage, with declamations of streams in deep ravines. The walls cast wavering spangles across the strollers who come here to reflect on their ongoing projects.

If we picture the universe as a vast quantum matrix, then these old intelligences have been at work for a long time, serving as nodes of far-reaching connectivity...way down there in the foam of vacuity, always dreaming up properties of matter, condensing their far-flung songlines and discussing what adjustments of laws would pave the way for coherent forms...what mesh of material properties would allow such forms to embark on an evolutionary course?

Those wise ones envisioned eons when time would bear fruit in the poignant experiences of transient beings, and those beautiful experiences would always point toward further fruitions.

Fluidity would be needed for these fruitions, so that awareness of time's passing could double back and sense its own transience, until layers of recursion would build up like petals of a rose.

The old intelligences harkened back to the fluidity of dense early plasmas and the fusion-flux at the heart of stars. They also harken forward to the cascade of transformations towards which time is hastening. In their vision for the middle world of transient beings, they decided that a fluid nexus would make the best life medium. Their idea of water became an edifice where they could meet to discuss the properties of matter across intersecting realms...a convenient site from which to survey the landscapes of possibility space.

"We must let the tender ones toughen their softness against metal, so they can lift themselves and extend their powers. The water's flow will bring all their evolutionary potentials into play...it will help them to carry their burdens. Once metal's sharpness has been worn down, those tender ones can re-manifest their softness in a new way."

The wise ones played through all the scenarios in their imaginative meditations, dreaming up ways to contain and harness an excess of fire. They kept coming back to water as the hub where matter's evolutionary tricks could interlock in a living fabric. Water delivers nutrients; water suspends salts; water repels lipids so they can line up in membranes; water quivers and shifts in gels; water provides an electrolytic balance as a background state, so nerve impulses can move along a membrane. Within the plasm of a cell, water's constant tiny vibrations help to nudge components into their sockets on the surface of an enzyme, enabling those components to join into a protein chain. Water is a fundamental link in the respiratory and photosynthetic cycles of cells. Water is incorporated in carbon compunds to make structural molecules for cells.

Water self-adheres so it can be drawn up thru narrow tubules of plants; water can be pushed with little friction through capillaries of animals. Water in liquid form conducts heat; water in solid form floats to the surface of a lake and insulates the water below, to keep it from freezing.

On a planetary level, water moves in cycles thru the atmosphere. It provides big reservoirs where living things can thrive; it serves as a heat sink and evaporative cooler that helps to stabilize the planet's temperature. Water delivers itself to sedentary life forms on land. The land could not even exist if water did not enter into silicates and calcium carbonates to make stone. On top of that, water leaches out trace elements from upthrust rock and brings them down to replenish the flatlands, to be absorbed into the bodies of living things.

So it was fitting that the old intelligences chose water as life's vehicle. Around water's properties, the formative loops of life-making processes are joined in an ever-flowing knot. Even if water flows outside of a living body, it is not reducible to unliving and unloving stuff. It always belongs to the sacred dispensation that makes a cradle for life. Even when it flows outside the bodies of those tender, transient beings, it is not inert...it is making a long detour to come back within them. So in view of its disposition that meshes with life's multi-level needs, it is always a key part of life's story. By treating it as the flowing core of life, those tender babes will make a leap of intuition, to enter the GREATER CIRCULATION and occupy the full body of cosmic man on Earth.
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