Heroes Not Zombies

I do think these little yellow flowers are beautiful, but after overnight rain, once the sun comes up, their embellished appearance lifts them to new heights. Aren’t they gorgeous?

We tend to take water for granted. We don’t really think about it much until either we have none, because of drought, or burst pipes, or something else which has cut off our supply, or until we have too much, when the rivers burst their banks and the land is flooded. Both of those circumstances are very distressing. There are those who live with drought, struggling every day to find enough water, those who live with polluted supplies, who are constantly drinking infected, or poisoned water, and those whose houses have been indundated and made uninhabitable.

Too little, or too much…..neither is welcome.

Water fascinates me. It’s an astonishing substance, created from the combination of oxygen and hydrogen…..how did that happen? Where were the first water molecules in the universe created? Without that happy combination of those two elements, each produced in the great furnaces of stars scattered across the night sky, life here on Earth would be impossible. About 60% of the human body is water…….60%!

This peculiar, but vital, substance, with two hydrogen atoms bound to one oxygen at its essence, has astonishing properties. It’s one of the few substances which expands as it freezes, and it has the incredible ability to exist in solid, liquid and gaseous form in the natural world. It’s what clouds are made of, it’s what falls as rain, tumbles down the mountains as streams and rivers, fills the oceans and thanks to wind and the sun flies up from the ocean surface to disappear into the sky, completing what we call “the water cycle”. I think it was the water cycle which first introduced me to the idea that everything in this planet is connected. It introduced me to the whole subject of ecology, and to the study of bio systems.

We don’t really understand how it behaves the way it does, but one thing which were are very familiar with is the ability of water to separate out into droplets, the way you see it adorning this beautiful yellow flower. There’s some exquisite balance of opposites….of surface tension and molecular bonding….which produces sparkling displays like this. However, as best I know, nobody is able to predict either how many water droplets will form on a single flower, nor tell us where exactly each drop will form.

When I look at this image, I start with a feeling of delight, of joy at the sight of such beauty, but then, that delight is flooded with a sense of wonder, and my thoughts fly off in all the directions I’ve just described – back to the origins of the universe, around the water cycle which makes life possible on planet Earth, into the human body, and further, into the very structure of water itself. All this involves my whole brain – my right brain engaging with the totality of the phenomenon, and my left abstracting, categorising and analysing. I don’t do all that in a deliberate way…..it just all happens, and contributes to one of those moments of “émerveillement du quotidien” that I’ve written about before.