…One of the moods of water, I suggested yesterday, is life. Here’s another:

Okanagan Lake (Looking West towards Ewings Landing)

It still looks full of life. Now here is some of it on its way down to the lake…

Yes, now instead of the blue of oxygen it has the green of cholorophylll. Here it is just metres from the lake.

Smooth Sumac

Still found inside life. Those rocks look like they’ve lost their water long ago. Life holds it. It slows it. The degree to which it does so, even when completely dried from coming through a winter, such as these sumac drupes on the shore of Kalamalka Lake…

… is another measure of the moods of water… in this case, its interface not with light or oxygen, but with time. Just as life can be seen wherever water is present, time can be seen in the organic compounds water crystallizes through the anti-entropy forces we call life. In this case, the berries are dead but the seeds within them are alive. Nonetheless, it is the colour that speaks to us as life. In the lakeshore lichens below, we are drawn to the water pattern that life has solidified and held in time. Same with this oregon grape colony, spreading on a hill.

A few years of water, recorded by life? Pretty impressive, but look at this below:

Okanagan Grassland Above Okanagan Lake

That’s six thousand years or so.

Life is a mood of water, I think we could say.. So is time. In fact, it would be fair to say that life is a mechanism of turning into time the flow of water, and of turning into matter water’s tendency to evaporate. In turn, water gives matter the ability to move, and that, too, is a way of manipulating time and space. So, not only is life a mood of water, and water a mood of life, but our eyes are able to measure these moods of water. We call it light, but it’s not really light we’re measuring.

We are seers of water and time.