On a road trip through Norway a couple of summers ago the sheer number of lakes we drove past, over, under and through was breathtaking. An endless succession of limpid sweet water pools, some massive, others petite, some with inexplicable homes in the middle of them, many with elks and moose drinking at their banks. I couldn’t help but think of the unfairness of world water distribution; so much all the way up there, so clean and pure and yet in other parts of the world there is almost none and what little there is of it is dirty, diseased and unsafe, in so many places where the cursed ‘bottom billion’ live, or do their best to do so.
This year World Water Day puts the focus on the connection between water and the creation of energy, clean safe energy like the Norwegians produce, (for example most of their electricity comes from hydropower) in a bid to improve health and environmental standards and make the lives of those billion better, liveable.
Water is indeed life, and there are even those who sustain that it is in fact alive. A Japanese man by the name of Masaru Emoto, a Doctor of Alternative Medicine is one of those and he claims that water is responsive to kindness and cruelty just like all living things are – people, animals, water…. He will for example say lovely things to a glass or beaker of water, play Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Corelli to it or call it names and shout negative words like death or war at it. He then freezes drops of water from the beakers and the ensuing snowflakes that are formed are either crystal clear and beautifully shaped when gently spoken to or fragmented and dirty when subjected to harsh words and feelings; apparently. (He refuses to replicate his water freezing experiments in front of a scientific community…)
The roots of his theory lie in an ancient Japanese school of thought called “Kotodama” or roughly translated – the healing power of words. So here’s an anecdote:
Lake Biwa is a large, polluted freshwater lake in the area where Dr. Emoto lives that is also plagued by algae that rots and turns foul smelling, year in year out. One recent summer Emoto and a group of 300 or so people gathered on the lake’s shores and basically said nice things to it in a sort of prayer ceremony.
Locals and respected national newspapers a few months later noted that Lake Biwa was no longer foul smelling…
It’d be nice to think that the ‘bottom billion’ could be helped by Kotodama, that all it would take are a few nice words and good-bye cholera and typhoid; hmmm…
That said whether through the esoteric or the concrete, clean, safe water for all of humanity is an imperative must, and a non-negotiable prerogative, so please support:
World Water Day, Friday March 21st, 2014.
http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/about-world-water-day/world-water-day-2014-water-and-energy/en/