One could call the stones in the shore of Big Bar Lake below “wet.” They have been taken into the power of “wetting”, or wætur. They have, in other words, been wetted. They have been taken, in a spiritual sense.

The process of “wetting” or “water” is, however, not wet. If you dip a hand into this process, you will be wetted, as is the stone below, but the substance itself is as dry as the mint flowering above the shore.

The water itself has a dry surface. It would be a mistake to consider “dry” as the opposite of “wet” and drawing its being from it. “Dry” is a different energy entirely. The light in the Big Bar Wetland, and the round swarm of insects keeping themselves warm through the night by coming together into a circle, are both dry.

It’s a beautiful distinction. The lily pads below, and the cat tail shadows on them, are both dry on their upper surfaces, while the shadows continue down into the water, still dry, and the leaves are wet on their lower surfaces.

You can see the effect here, too, with these water weeds, rising out of wet energy until they enter the dry energy of the water’s surface.

These water striders go further. They live in the dry energy that adheres to water, without actually touching the water at all.

With the right shape, it is even possible, as the Thule reeds do below, to push the dry zone into the wet energy. They don’t, however, mix.

Well, not entirely. They mix in the human mind, which reads the wave patterns between them.

If we call that “light”, we are describing only the process of touching this surface with our minds. If we reach the mind any further, the hand passes through the skin of dryness into what the mind cannot see and which only skin can properly name. The mind is left with dry surfaces. It makes even the depths into such surfaces.

It describes them as “wet” only through the action of memory.

To speak, one must be present. As the dry puddle below shows during rain, it’s not just the mind that has memory.

In fact, memory is not the business of the mind at all. The mind shares in it, in the same way a hand thrust into a lake becomes wet.