This post is for anyone who loves to look at water or who enjoys being made out of the stuff, for Sigrun in Norway, who gets to live right beside it in an apartment filled with its light, and anyone who has ever marvelled at the universe. It’s a short and intimate journey. Here we go!

This is the delta of South BX Creek in Okanagan Landing BC. Here’s where the glacial silt ends and the 99 miles of melted glacier that we call Okanagan Lake begins. It is a favourite places for birds and fish, but today let’s look at the water and the light under the big old willows lining the creek’s banks…

If I had made these images from the south bank of the creek, they would be what we call “right side up”. Truth is, there is no right side or wrong side. This is what trees and water do. That fact that a human observer can move from side to side and view to view is a narrative — the kind of narrative that folk tale is built out of. Even more fascinating are the tips of the branches at the bottom of the image below…

The water is catching them and reflecting them every which way, as if it were twisting and reshaping the substance of the trees and the light themselves. Here’s a closer view of that effect…

… and a closer one yet …

Before Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the solar system and swept away such common human assumptions (still embedded in human experience today) as the notion that the sun rises over the shoulder of the earth (instead of the earth turning towards the sun), views like this were images of light moving on the face of the water and the spirits of trees and water joining to create energy that humans could apprehend. This was the grand vision of the medieval world. After Copernicus, the light no longer moved… the patterns are the result of the various fluid angles and reflective surfaces of water, which interfere with the direct transfer of light (which now moves in straight lines) to the human eye. This is a world of lenses and prisms. The “real” stories are now hidden. See?

The idea merits being restated. Here’s my attempt: in the medieval world, one saw light as the completed embodiment of physical nature. The goal was a continuation and an opening. In the modern world, one sees the records of energy within physical substances, not to open or extend them, but in order to set them aside and see the energy only — of which humans are no longer a part, except in revelations of the hidden power of intellect. Bodies don’t matter anymore‚ The trick is, can we, as humans, see that? Try it:

It’s hard, isn’t it, because human eyes observe colour and dimension and texture, and what they see is processed through images of the human body. I, for one, feel myself in those trees above, in the water, and in the grass on the near shore. Now, in the intellectually-based paradigms of the modern age, the human body is viewed as an autonomous life form, that moves god-like through the world, doing whatever it wishes, with no boundaries except those humans sets through  social relationships. In the medieval age, the human body was viewed as a representation of the world, that moved through itself towards ineffable visions of light. The social relationships extended beyond the simply human. Is that easier to see?

As far as I can tell, there is no break between the medieval and modern visions — or, at least, there need not be. What’s more, the modern vision is now reaching towards renewed integration with the physical world, yet continually attempts to do so through intellectual process. Even art, that union of mind and body into gesture, has become largely an intellectual process in contemporary society. Is it able, however, to touch this, to extend it, to converse with it, or to even see it, without transforming it into an intellectual process, or coming to it from one?

Let that be our benchmark for growth: if something does not start with human bodies on the earth it is not about human bodies on the earth. We could go further: if something does not start with the earth it is not about the earth. That brings clarity, I think. Copernican science, for instance, begins with a particular conception of God and Intellect as being separate from the earth and being pure and eternal forces in their own right, not the purification of physical being but separate from them or consciously animating them. It is a bold and daring conception (which many contemporary people will find alien, although they may live its precepts daily) but I’ll tell you one thing: it is impossible to make a poem in that fashion, to see water, or to heal yourself from a severe illness. If you go close to the modern paradigm, you see patterns of energy. If you go close to the physical paradigm that the modern one claims to have superseded, you will see them, too, but they will look like this:

Is it physical? Is it spirit? Nonsense! They are the same thing. To close, here’s another image of the human body, transformed by vision into a more-than-human shape.

God, I love this place.