Love Letters to Water. excerpts from an anthology by Claudiu Murgan

LET WATER LIVE 
Geraldine Sinyuy (poet), CAMEROON 
 

Water is life 
Water is love 
Water for life, 
Water for the seeds to grow 
Water for the fishes in the seas, 
Water for transportation 
Water for cleansing 
Water for restoration. 
 
No water, no life. 
No water, no food, 
No water, no sea transport 
No water, no trees 
No water, no fish, 
No water, no beauty. 
Save the water, save lives. 
Pollute the water, you pollute life. 
No water no firmament, 
The water existed before mankind, 
Honour water, respect water. 
 

No water, no castles high and huge 
No water, no chemistry and apothecary, 
No water, no beer, no wine, no juice. 
Water is needed by both great and small, 
It’s the most basic need of mankind, fauna and flora. 
No water, no Timbuktu, 
No water, no trees, no voyages by ship, 
Life would be impossible without water, 
And all would be deserts, 
Human beings baked  
Like sand in the desert, 
And all entrails crushed  
and crumbled under touch 
like soaked chalk. 

Without water all would be wild storms of dust 
Unleashed from the bowels of an enraged nature! 
Wind and sun go rampage 
Thus drought in the land! 
Hungry starveling and thirsty souls 
Skeletal dehydrated ghosts 
Gape in the heavens 
Eyes sunk deep in dryness, 
Lips unable to pray 
Clipped together for lack of saliva! 

Fish and hippos forever united  
To sand and mud 
No surgical separation possible! 
This will be the fate of man without water? 
Let water live! 
 
Before 

Before you waste a glass of water, 
Think about a weary traveler in the desert. 
Who longs to have just a drop on his lip. 
Before you waste a bucket of water, 
Think about those who travel a thousand miles 
And dig a million metres 
Just to get a cup of water. 
Before you waste hours in a shower, 
Think about those who haven’t bathed for months. 
Before you pollute water, 
Think about those who depend on it, 
The people, the fish  
And life aquatic 
Before you toss away that bucket of used water, 
Think about recycling. 
Before you let the rain water waste, 
Think about the drought.  

Cameroonian born Sinyuy Geraldine trained as an English Language and Literature  Teacher at the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon where she obtained a Secondary and High School Teacher’s Diploma in 2005. Geraldine earned her PhD in Commonwealth Literature from the University of Yaoundé in 2018 and currently teaches English Language and Literature at Government Bilingual High School, Down Town Bamenda.

She is a book review/contributing editor at WordCity Monthly Journal; co-editor/contributing author of the poetry anthology, Poetry in Times of Conflict; and author of Music in the Wood: and Other Folktales.

Sinyuy passionately advocates for organic gardening and environmental care.

She has had the following awards; Featured Change Maker at World Pulse #She Transforms Tech Featured Change Makers Program.

Featured Storyteller on World Pulse Story Awards, May 2017.

Prize of Excellence as Best Teacher of the Year in CETIC Bangoulap, Bangangte, 23 October, 2010.

She is also Winner of the British Council Essay Writing Competition, Yaoundé, 2007, and Winner of Short Story Runner-Up Prize, Literary Workshop: CRTV Bamenda, 1998. 

LOVE LETTERS TO WATER
Rainey Marie Highley (author, coach, yoga teacher), USA 

 						       
Inside... 
         You have journeyed with us.  
         For eons. Unnoticed. Unrecognized.  
Finally.  
Our conscious union begins...  
         We sing.  
         You move.  
               Masaru Emoto taught me that.  
         Sacred geometric dancing...  
         Creates the energetic conditions.  
Alchemical Transmutation.  
         Trans-form  
               Frozen  
                     now melting  
               Liquid 
                     evaporating  
         Mist in between  
               Steam  
 	 	     It’s all moving, you see.  
               Plasma  
                     You read about the 4th phase, right?   
               What is that, you say?  
         Liquid Light  
         That’s right  
We ascend.  
         Transcend.  
               Trans-form  
                    The human condition a distant dream...  
               Memories flooding back.  
               Respect, reverence, realization  
               Your sacrifice etched forever...  
                    Engraved in every molecule,  
                    Imprinted on our souls...  
Love 
     and  
         Gratitude  
     Always  
Love 
     and  
         Gratitude.  

Rainey Marie Highley is an award-winning metaphysical author of over seven published books including two #1 Amazon bestsellers and the award-winning book, The Water Code: Unlocking the Truth Within. As a Spiritual Life Coach, Soul Tribe Teacher & Guide, Rainey helps clients shed societal programming, accelerate their spiritual growth, awaken to their soul’s mission, and grow in happiness, confidence, strength, and courage. Rainey is based in Sedona, Arizona USA. For more, go to www.4authenticity.com.

Fiction

THE STORY OF THE SEVEN LAKES

Claudiu Murgan (author, podcaster), CANADA

The story of the Seven Lakes surrounding the peaks of the Sacred Mountain had immemorial roots.

Word-of-mouth that had survived generations now extinct said that God had created Adam and Eve as giants, and that was the place where they had first walked as living beings.

The heaviness of their bodies had left deep recesses on the moist soil that later filled with the water with which God had blessed the land after that important creation.

Shaken by the awareness of who they were, Adam and Eve had knelt down to face each other, pushing up the ground that was now the Sacred Mountain, but only Adam’s left knee had touched the ground. The other one had kept its footing, pressing hard for balance. Adam’s Right Foot lake is the deepest, and some say, the most treacherous.

The mountain’s dizzying heights and jagged edges were never conquered by mortal climbers on their way to fame. Millenia had passed, and humans had learned to stay away for their own safety and gaze at the threatening peaks from a distance, getting their satisfaction by their daily fulfilment of mundane goals.

Rumors spread throughout the communities at the foot of the mountain, that the wisdom and teaching transmitted orally from gurus to yogis, were much more potent than the written ones.

Stories rolled into myths like timid spheres of snow that, when reaching their tipping point, become devastating avalanches. The few touched by the teaching neither confirmed nor denied the validity of the primordial creation or what happened after Adam and Eve were, mesmerized by the love beaming from their physical shells.

How could love and the realization they had been spirit molded into physicality, shrunk to allow for procreation and the nimble integration into what they understood was Mother?

Why had they kept to themselves the knowledge about the healing powers of their tears that, when stored in vials the size of a thimble were enough to bring health and prosperity to a whole family?

Was it true that God had imprinted the Water of the Lakes with innate intelligence and awareness as if it were a fluid-vigilante over humankind?

Historians had yet to uncover any words Adam, Eve, or of their descendants, for that matter, had written about Water’s role in its time-forsaken hide-out.  

Openings the size of a peephole on the sides of the six of the lakes allowed for the trickle of a whisper of the water to find its way down the slopes, hopping over stones and fallen logs, clearing layers of leaves with lost identities, resting along its arduous journey in clear puddles.

Humans and animals alike quenched their thirst from the liquid veins traversing Mother in all directions, but only a handful of them appreciated the gift of life through open prayer and thankful thoughts.

Centuries had passed before inquisitive minds acknowledged the omnipresence and omnipotence of Water. It played so many characters at once: fluid in the shape of oceans, rivers, and ponds; vapor in the invisible state of humidity and flying rivers; solid in monumental ice sculptures attached to the side of unforgivingly steep mountains and aged icecaps.

Over time, the spirituality and scientific inquiries stirred in the cauldron of evolutionary thinking, raised the unthinkable question: was Water another form of God?

Heads nodded equally in agreement and denial. Were they afraid to elevate Water to such an inconceivable level? Was it sacrilege? Water seemed to know it all, to record in its fluid molecular structure the rise and the fall of life on Earth from its inception.

Naturally, another query dropped into the pool of human consciousness: if the awakened Water seeped from the Sacred Mountain, would it contain the biological imprints of Adam and Eve?

Thoughts scattered in all directions like a beehive under a bear attack and then quieted, appalled by their intrusion into seeking the bond between God and Water. The mystery remains unsolved. 

Is Water God?

Claudiu Murgan is enthralled by our consciousness and the notion of  our place in the enormous wheels of the multiverse. His settings as science fiction, fantasy or eco-fiction, focus on describing the beauty of Mother Nature, who demands action from all of us.

Claudiu’s experience in various industries such as IT, renewable energies, real estate and finance helped him create complex, realistic characters that bring forward meaningful messages.

Claudiu is the author of three Science Fiction/Fantasy novels: The Decadence of Our Souls, Water Entanglement, and Crystal Cloud. His short stories have been published in anthologies in the USA, Canada, Italy, and Romania.

Connect at ClaudiuMurgan.com

Non-fiction

WATER

Wade Davis (ethnographer, author, filmmaker), CANADA

We are born of water, a cocoon of comfort in a mother’s womb. As infants our bodies are almost exclusively liquid.

Even as adults only a third of our physical being has solidity.

Compress our bones, ligaments and muscle sinew, extract the platelets and cells from our blood, and the rest of us, nearly two- thirds of our weight, stripped clean and rinsed, would flow as easily as a river to the sea. 

We live on a water planet. Two atoms of hydrogen bonded to an atom of oxygen, multiplied by the miracle of physics and chemistry are transformed into clouds, rivers and rain.

A droplet in the palm of a hand rolls about, fortified by surface tension, a wall of oxygen atoms. Spilled to the ground, it changes shape to match whatever it touches, yet adheres and bonds to nothing save itself.

The unique physical properties of water alone allow tears to roll down the skin, perspiration to bead in the nape of the neck, menstrual blood to flow.

Breath condenses, soft as mist. Rainwater runs as rivulets through cracks in the clay. Rivers of ice harden and flow. Streams slip away to the sea. 

Water can be a crystal matrix, solid as glacial ice, as delicate as a snow flake. It falls from the sky as rain, sleet or hail. It disappears as vapor only to reappear as fog. It pools in great caverns beneath the surface of the world, erupts in geysers, cascades over the highest of escarpments, sweeps as oceans above the tallest of mountain ranges.

 Water can shift states, becoming gas, solid or liquid, but its essence can be neither created nor destroyed.

The amount of moisture on the planet does not change through time. The water that slaked the thirst of dinosaurs is the same as that which tumbles to the sea today, the same fluid that has nurtured all sentient life since the dawn of creation.

The sweat from your brow, the urine from your bladder, the very blood in your body will ultimately seep into the ground to become part of the hydrological cycle, the endless and infinite process of evaporation, condensation and precipitation that makes possible all of biological existence. 

Water in this sense has no beginning and no end. To slip one’s hand into a pool, a lake, or an ocean is to return to the point of origins, to connect across the eons to that primordial moment, impossibly distant in time, when celestial bodies, perhaps frozen comets, collided with the earth and brought the elixir of life to a lonely, barren planet spinning in the velvet void of space. 

Wade Davis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic.

Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Author of 23 books, including One River, The Wayfinders and Into the Silence, winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top nonfiction prize in the English language, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.

His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for the NGS.

Davis, one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, is the recipient of 12 honorary degrees, as well as the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2015 Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the 2017 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award, the 2017 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration, and the 2018 Mungo Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. 

In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.

His latest book is Magdalena: River of Dreams, Knopf, 2020.

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