WATER

Because water exists in more than one state, it moves in a constant hydrological cycle, “an unending journey through streams, rivers and oceans; the atmosphere; the ice sheets; living systems; and the deep earth.” [2] This cycle underscores the fluidity of water, not merely as liquid but as ever-changing and continually renewing. It courses through our veins, fills our cells, cools our skin, and is released with every breath, but it also rises as mist from oceans and rivers, gathers into clouds, and returns as rain or snow. It seeps into soil, swelling roots and greening fields, then flows downward to carve valleys and swell the seas once more. From glacier to spring, from tear to tide, water moves in an endless circuit: soil and sky, body and breath, land and sea, an eternal pilgrimage that binds all life together. [3]

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

W. H. AUDEN [4]

Not only is our home made mostly of water, so are we. In Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water, Philip Ball insists, “Understanding what we are composed of, and where that stuff came from, is part of our dignity.” [5] As we age, the water in our bodies lessens from 75 percent as infants to about sixty percent in older adults; there’s “[over 10 gallons of water] carried in trillions of cells.” [6] Our veins echo the pulsing tides, moving the salt-water blood of our bodies through and around our organ landmasses until every cell is sufficiently watered. Our bodies even float in water because they are nearly the same density as it and with mostly the same mineral composition as the sea. Perhaps this is why Wallace Nichols remarks that bodies are “[water’s way] of going about, beyond the reach of rivers.” [7]

Every drop of water around us and in us predates …well, nearly everything. Water is not just what makes life possible; as the doctor who discovered Vitamin C once said, it is “life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.” [8]

The stars are more than mere fireballs–they are engines of creation, and out of their fiery hearts come the elements needed to make worlds.

Philip Ball [9]

In the first great flare of creation hydrogen was born, the simplest and most abundant element, its very name meaning “water-former.” For ages it drifted through the dark, until the hearts of stars forged oxygen in their fiery cores and flung it outward in supernovae. When hydrogen and oxygen found one another, they wedded into the strangest and most generous of molecules: water, the ubiquitous liquid that carves valleys, sculpts stone, and makes life itself possible. [10]

The water molecules currently moving through our veins and protecting our brains, those pulsing through rivers and springing from the depths, even those still beneath Earth’s crust are older than the earth itself. 

In an internet-famous conversation between comedian Pete Holmes and scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Should you choose to watch the clip, beware the course language!), the latter offers the astounding fact that “there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world’s oceans,” which my brother, a civil engineer, noted is true by a factor of about 5,500 to 1.  As if that wasn’t amazing enough, Tyson goes on to mention that because of the prevalence and seeming eternality of water, it is a scientific inevitability that within each of us are molecules of water that formed and moved through the bodies of folks like Jesus and St. Columba. 

When the griever of Lamentations exclaims, “Your mercies are new every day,” she couldn’t have known that the same waters that baptized Jesus, cleanse us anew each morning, but that is the mysterious, grace-filled reality in which we live! Likewise, when we weep, the God of heaven and earth, weeps with us; Christ’s tears flow through our own.

But if that is true…then there also remain water molecules that once pulsed through the hearts of folks like Judas and the Vikings who ravaged Iona, year after bloody year. The waters that destroyed entire lands and raged against peaceful peoples still swamp our minds and seep from our mouths as well.

We are companioned in every aspect of this human journey, the peaceful and the painful, and like those who have come before and those who will follow, we are each awash with complexity and compromise. We are each seeking our way back from the cliff's edges of loneliness and isolation, of regret and shame, of anxiety and fear, looking for remedies all around us. Yet all the while, the waters themselves bear witness to our shared story and echo the promise of renewal.

So perhaps the Well of Eternal Youth is not about magical rejuvenation at all, but mystical union, the recognition that in every sip we are taking part in something older than stars, something that has moved through prophets and pilgrims, soldiers and sinners, saints and seekers. Water has carried both flood and baptism, both lament and healing, and yet it never ceased to flow in ceaseless praise to its Creator, never ceased to renew itself or the world it serves and animates. 

To cup our hands at Dun I’s well is to cradle eternity and to drink of the grace that has always been flowing and will always flow, nurturing our renewal and carrying our own fragile stories into the unbroken stream of life.