My Three Stories About Water
Or, how water found me in the west.
There is such a difference between thinking something and feeling something. What can drive us crazy as human beings, namely our emotional life, is the very thing that allows a visceral response to what we are experiencing. Are you familiar with that vibration that seems to begin in one’s gut, then travels all through one’s body? It precedes a kind of knowing that can only come from our absorbing an experience right into our cells. It functions as an alarm of sorts. An alert. A physical message saying, Pay attention. This is important.
The first time it happened to me during an experience with water, a friend had just gifted me a copy of Masaru Emoto’s book The Hidden Messages in Water. Emoto’s work revealed, through empirical observation, that water reacts to human thought and emotion by playing certain kinds of music to water, then photographing the resulting affects. Emoto observed both beautiful crystalline structures, and sometimes disturbing ones, in response to what the water was "hearing." He also experimented with intent, both spoken and written, directed at water and photographed the response the water displayed.
As I read his words and looked at the photographs in his book, I felt that visceral tingle in my body, alerting me that something about this was important. I slowly started to pay more attention to water.
Emoto's book
My second experience with water happened while enhancing materials for an art installation I was making for a group exhibition called MASH UP: An Artist Invitational in Colorado (Windsor Art & Heritage Center, 2018). I created Tended Primitive Emergence, an installation for the exhibition that celebrated the preciousness of water. A ritualistic space, it included the possibility of visitors interacting with the work by writing their thoughts and feelings about water in one of the pieces I made for the installation, Water Book.
Water Table and Atoms (L) and Water Book (R) - from the installation Tended Primitive Emergence
Water Book is made of bound pages of plain brown wrapping paper (the kind one can find in a discount store) that have been soaked in the Cache la Poudre river. The Poudre, as it's called locally, flows through the city of Windsor. It is one of the few rivers in the United States of America that has never been dammed. To create the book, my very good friend Bhanu and her very good dog Porky joined me on the river's edge to soak the brown paper. As I knelt down and placed my hands in water of the Poudre I had what many have called a ‘hallelujah' moment. I deeply felt a strong communion with the water, a very strong feeling of gratitude toward it. It was a remarkable experience as the water in me seemed to vibrate with the water in the river. I will never forget it, and although I haven’t been able to duplicate the feeling itself, even as I try to write about it here, I do recall what a profound feeling it was.
I have soaked paper for work before. For an installation called skin, I soaked paper for a piece called The Book of Pearls in salt water. I then invited visitors to the installation to write the names of those who had died at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (military, enemy and civilian) from typed lists onto the soaked pages. Although the making of that installation touched me deeply, soaking the paper in salt water did not effect me in the same way as soaking paper in the Cache la Poudre river.
The third experience was an encounter that when I tell you about it, you may think that I had lost my mind. Doesn’t matter. I felt it, it happened, and I am so grateful that it did. I will try to describe it for you, here.
It was a very dry week and month here in the high desert landscape of north-east Colorado. As has become more common now, during an era of climate emergency, we needed rain. I was sitting at my computer at around 10:30 p.m. on yet another dry summer’s night. I paused my typing, and called out to rain in hopes that it would hear me and come visit, dropping its bounty onto a thirsty ‘us’ below. I know it was 10:30 because when I heard the soft rumble of thunder in the distance, I glanced at the time while thinking, "How wonderful." I was hopeful that the thunder was announcing that moisture would make it to the ground, as at times it evaporates before reaching us.
I jumped up and raced out the front door, excited to check out where the potential storm might be coming from. I looked south, then west, and then I looked up. There I saw soft clouds sitting above our house. In them flashed a soft lightning and accompanying it, the sound of soft thunder. I remember that everything, the sights and sounds, were all so very soft. Just as I began to register what I was experiencing, I realized that I had popped outside, and was now standing in the middle of our street, in my underwear. I was so excited by the possibility of the approaching storm I didn’t want to miss a minute of its arrival so I went bounding out the front door barely clothed. I needed to go and put something on.
Once inside I grabbed a robe and went out on our back stoop to wait for the water. And it came! As softly as the clouds and lightning and thunder I saw above me. Soft and steady. Now here’s what some may consider the whacky part. With every drop of water that touched my skin I heard, “We love you Sharon." What? I was dumfounded. I stood there, experiencing one of the most incredible things I had ever experienced, thinking, “What is going on?” I wasn’t high. I hadn’t been drinking. I was just so excited to feel the rain. But I never in my life thought that I could have such an experience.
I just stood there, absorbing the love as if another person who I loved was whispering to me, “I love you." I began to cry as I stood on the stoop, releasing my water to the rain as I felt its drops touching me.
At first I was very reluctant to tell anyone about my experience as I questioned myself whether I had lost my mind. Then, slowly, I began to share my experience with those whom I love and trust. Family and friends.
And now, I’m going public. I’m sharing it with you.
After my experiences, building from discovering Emoto to my rain interaction, I began collecting information on water. Not just about the function of it, but the magic of it. I found out that water cannot be created or destroyed, it only changes form (well it can be created, but it's really hard and really dangerous.) That there are theories about the origins of the earth's water and why water defines us as the blue planet. I learned that water carries information in our bodies, in ways that are important to the creating of our DNA, of the making of who we are. And it’s even been proven that water has memory.
Now, when I drink water I thank it. When I bathe in water I thank it. When I stand at a river’s edge and soak paper for the WWWP (the World Wide Water Project, born after my initial soaking visit with the Cache la Poudre river), I thank it. And I am sharing information and my experiences with water more widely, through my art, Zoom presentations and blogging, as I am with you here. I share it however I can and whenever I can. Because I am hoping that by doing so you too will thank the water, bless the water, express gratitude to the water. That you too will become aware of the water, all the time.
Bhanu was with me once again in October as I soaked paper for the WWWP while thanking the water (L).
Paper, pinned to a ship's deck chair, collecting mist from the Antarctic (R) - from WWWP participants Gene and Way.
And, I am hopeful that we will all begin, again, and in earnest, to protect the water, as many others have been and continue to do. As the water protectors did at Standing Rock - through bitter cold and very difficult living conditions.
Wisdom traditions have known and practiced gratitude for water for millennia. Many cultures throughout the world practice their expression of gratitude as a living thing through traditions as alive as the water herself. I have begun collecting the wisdom shared with us all as I find it. I am learning from it. Here is one example:
"Water sustains all life. Her songs begin in the tiniest of raindrops, transform to flowing rivers, travel to majestic oceans and thundering clouds and back to earth again. When water is threatened, all living things are threatened.” Garma International Indigenous Declaration on Water, from the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (2001). Similar declarations have been made by the Assembly of First Nations, and by many, many others in the world who understand and practice reverence to bodies of water, and who understand our true connection as human beings to water in all its forms.
Looking back on my own work as a visual artist, I can see that I have been including water elements in it for a long time. But as my awareness and my knowledge grows, my work is evolving into being about water itself and my/our relationship with it.
I recently exhibited two pieces for a group exhibition (elementals, in Greeley, Colorado) called water/falling and rain. Visitors to the exhibition were welcomed to reach into a large object (I call it a pod) sitting splayed open on the floor and filled with tree pods that I had collected one autumn a few years ago. My invitation was simply, take one. The tree pods had symbols for water painted on them in blue, either in Japanese kanji, Sanskrit, chemical, hieroglyphic or alchemical. Other pods had the Japanese kanji symbol for the heart painted in green. I used tree pods because trees are 50% or more water, dependent on the type of tree and the pods are light and easy to carry. It is my hope that visitors who took pods home with them will think of water every time they look at the pod and the symbol painted on it.
water/falling and rain from the group exhibition elementals (L). A detail of water/falling (R)
A detail of the pods painted with various symbols for water (showing a pod painted with the alchemical symbol for water and beside it the Sanskrit symbol for water).
The companion piece to water/falling in the exhibition is a wall hanging called rain. rain is an abstraction of rainfall inspired by the images of rain I have seen in Japanese woodblock prints. Periodically I would visit this piece to untangle the strands of blue silk and cotton that had clumped together because of air currents in the gallery - a very meditative practice.
rain
Currently, I am preparing a proposal for my next installation, about water, in which I will include books of bound paper soakings which I now call gratitude pages, collected from those who have participated in the WWWP so far. I have gratitude pages from places as far away as the Dead Sea shore in Jordan, off a pier at the Baltic Sea in Sweden, from the river Cam in Cambridge, England, and a page “soaked” in the sea mist of the Antarctic. I have pages from the confluence of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, a bowl of water collected from a dehumidifier in Ohio, and from the Mississippi, at the point where it demarcates the line between Iowa and Illinois along I-80 I have gratitude pages from New Jersey, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Utah and California. And I have gratitude pages from closer to home, like a friend's field irrigation ditch, a creek in a local golf course, a lake two blocks up my street and a soak in the snow in my back yard. Some who participated have sent me images of them soaking the paper and thanking the water.
Knowledge about The WWWP prompted an invite from the Loveland Museum/Gallery, here in Loveland, Colorado, to mount an exhibition. Titled Speaking to Water, it included a wall filled with a selection of gratitude papers I have been collecting, images of those who were soaking the paper, an artist talk about the project, and an invite for visitors to participate in a secondary project by taking paper to soak then return it, to be bound into a book. I was also invited to share the WWWP with Colorado State University’s Community Literacy Center, both for participants and volunteers who work for the Center’s outreach program. As awareness of the WWWP grows, so does participation - flowing outward, connecting others, and hopefully increasing awareness about our primal and magical connection with water, in addition to prompting more activism and advocacy for water rights - real water rights, and not just “our” water rights.
If you would be kind enough to participate in the WWWP, here are some helpful instructions to allow for consistency when the pages are bound into books (although not necessary, as some have sent me paper from their notebooks and a torn-open paper bag and they too will be bound).
Cut or tear a piece of plain brown wrapping paper into a 18″ x 24″ sheet. Fold the 24″ side in two. Open the sheet and soak the paper in a water source. Any water source. While soaking, with your hands in the water, thank, bless, express gratitude to the water - a process that takes it from being just a sheet of paper to a gratitude page. Let the page dry. On the right inside sheet write the date and place you soaked the paper on the top right corner. Add any other words, drawings, stories, poems, etc you may like to include. Not necessary, just if you like. Roll, fold or lay the page flat and send to me at: Sharon Carlisle. Artworks Center for Contemporary Art, Studio 121. 310 Railroad Avenue. Loveland, CO 80537.
If you would like to send me images of your soaking experience, email them to me at carlisle.studio@mail.com.
I thank you for reading about my three magical experiences with water, and I hope that you too increase your awareness and experience your connection to water, however that may happen.
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