“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface, but connected in the deep.” —William James
Last summer I went swimming solo down the coast of Jacksonville Beach. While I rarely go alone, the glassy sea and the sunrise was a perfect lure. Walking the path back to the pier parking lot, I encountered a guy squatting in the sand, puffing on a spent filter-less cigarette. Looking up at me, one eye open, one eye squinting in the sun, he said, “You. You’re part of the water system.”
We are all connected. Is it just an aphorism or are we part of the same system? Do we really know how and to what effect? Is there a conduit that connects us? Blood through the veins; signals on the wire; our voice through the air; light through space; and the Eagles put us on a highway. We hold this innate belief that wherever there is a connection, there is a conduit, because it jibes with our realty.
Yet a physicist could argue there is no conduit when accounting for quantum entanglement, aka “spooky action at a distance.” Is it possible to connect without a wire? In 1935, Einstein, along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, came up with the EPR Paradox, a thought experiment basically concluding that an effect propagating instantly across a distance is in conflict with the theory of relativity. However, experiments confirm that separated parts of a quantum system have an instantaneous influence on one another. Apparently, distance doesn’t matter.
Physicist Nick Herbert says, “Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter… [They link] up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay.” Counter to our everyday observations, it is possible for something to be at a discrete state or place and then instantly another, such as the quantum jump of an electron. No space crossed. It happens when we heat up our coffee. In our macro world, it’s hard to see. We look for a conduit to rationalize how information travels and hence how we are connected.
Still, we “just know” when something happens or will happen to a loved one, here or across the world. Just ask my mom.
I hold it all to be true: the guy on the beach, mom, quantum entanglement, data traveling through the cable, an intuitive thought, and the scent in the air telling me the beans are roasting while we are at the coffee shop. The light of your waving hand reaching my eyes from across the counter.
Acknowledging that the physics involved with the light of your waving hand includes how it warms my heart somewhere down that pipeline.
Surprisingly little is said about our most essential connection. I’m not talking about the fiber optics cable that connects us with the external everything, but something more powerful, more akin to what Herbert postulated, but internally. That is the connection to ourselves, to being. It may seem a million miles away, but it is simply a jump. We’re outwardly connected, networked and hardwired, leaving the intrinsic connection in the wake of our externalization. Our thalamus in overdrive. We spend hours practicing our business and social development, working external connections for survival and acceptance.
Working our internal connection is also a practice. It’s scary in there. Perhaps that conduit is a road of learning. Yet once learned, there is no road to just being, to be connected to ourselves. One is either being or not being; there is no distance to travel because there is nothing between. Not even a millimeter. Being happens “without crossing space, without decay, and without delay.” Anyone who practices meditation can speak to that and so can most artists and athletes. As we witness the world, we learn through our senses, perceive, process and build our journey. Somehow we find the conduit that works for us and sometimes ones that don’t. Hopefully we find one that springs internal.
On my continuing journey, as it turns out, the conduit is water and it works. My river of learning. (Let me qualify this by saying I found a few conduits that didn’t work along the way.) Water is powerful in this realm because it gives us a vast library of analogy, metaphor and presence. It is the universe’s best visual representation of being. So when I say “we are all connected” and add “by water,” I mean that the connection is everywhere—physical, spiritual and limitless. Water is the great conduit, the current that flows through everything, “The Endless River,” to take from Pink Floyd’s final offering. “The water flowing / The endless river / Forever and ever.”
In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote in his essay titled “Self-Portrait,” “Of what is significant in one’s own existence, one is hardly aware… What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?” The water we swim in individually and collectively is, in fact, how we witness the world, perceive it and ultimately react to it.
This is where Water Works comes in. [Ed. note: This the first of a series of articles by Jim Alabiso titled Water Works]. How we witness the world through water, what it means and what we do with it. We’ll talk about everything water, what it offers physically and spiritually, in our art and in our hearts, in our work, on our planet and beyond. Beyond, as it is now thought that much of our water “arrived” here. (Andrew Fazekas, for National Geographic, 10/30/14).
“You. You’re part of the water system.” That message is for all of us.
Article written by Jim Alabiso
Thoughts and feedback? Write Jim at waterworks@jumpingfish.net.
