“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”― Bruce Lee
I came across a snippet of that Bruce Lee quote on someone else’s blog here on WordPress, though I’ve since lost track of it. It was a response to one of the Daily Prompts. I believe it was the one about naming a quote you live by or think of often.
The full color images here were free to use sourced on Pexels, but the black and white one is one of mine. It’s a bit low resolution since it’s a camera phone snap of a print, on actual photo paper. I used a cropped version of it for the cover art to my poetry collection, Shadow Flow: Seasons of Love & Loss.
Shadow Flow: Seasons of Love & Loss on Amazon
Teenaged me and my high school best friend had a whole conversation about the esoteric symbolism of water. “What if God is water?” she asked me, since that seemed to be where the conversation was logically headed.
I don’t know that you need to get that trippy with the metaphors; all the same, every time I remember the spiritual potency of water, and water energy, I think of her.
I especially liked Bruce Lee’s observations of water becoming the cup, and so on. So eloquent and poetic!
Literally, water sustains life, and cleanses, and smooths rough edges, breaks things open, buoys us upward when we float atop it.
Water can be creative or destructive.
Falling from the sky in the form of rain and snow, it waters the soil to help life thrive. Snow melt, and the ground thawing after all the hard freezes, prepare the way for spring.
Rushing water carves out canyons, as the Colorado River made the Grand Canyon, combining both creation and destruction.
Water can also cause life-threatening harm in powerful storms.
What might one make of this fuller dichotomy of water?
As a force of nature, it isn’t inherently good or evil. It simply is.
There’s also the water cycle to ponder, and its yin/yang nature, as it was explained to me in a high school physics class.
I’ll give you a very short but colorful anecdote of that lecture.
The instructor observed that many of us wore the yin/yang on our clothes etc., after having drawn it on the board. “But how many of you know what it really means?”
Many students offered theories, and he gently responded that none of them quite summed up the symbol. I raised my hand and said that it’s about the nature of opposites, living in balance, and that everything contains and is defined by its opposite.
Little did he know, I was into that sort of thing.
He looked so stunned! “That’s actually pretty good.” Then, he added that the symbol being drawn as a circle also shows a cyclical concept, how one thing becomes another, or something to that effect, in relation to evaporation, condensation, precipitation, etc.
A bit of casual research reveals that model of the water cycle is now considered insufficient to the actual level of complexity that takes place. Interesting! That website also reminded me water can exist as vapor, liquid, or solid, which is also pretty dang rad.
Moving on… I had thought to argue there are times to embody the more powerful and potentially destructive properties of water, by drawing on an image of a storm inside a teacup; however, the poem I thought contained those lines, in fact does not!
It does, however, mention a lot of forms of water, with a great deal of import attached to each instance water occurs within the poem. In the end, seemingly contradicting the battle between time and the lovers, the deep river runs on, suggesting a permanence underlying mortality, and our preconceived notions of time.
W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”
I wrote a bit of an ode to this poem and its occurrence in the film, Before Sunrise, in Love and the Phantom Queen of Suburbia, my series of open letters to people, creatives, and works of art that have been especially impactful to me.
If you’ve followed this blog for a bit, you’re familiar with my progress on the letters, as they were unfolding, and the changes I made to the title and the cover, etc. Here it is, for the curious, and then we will get back to water.
Love and the Phantom Queen of Suburbia on Amazon
Water.
Maybe it suggests that cycles are what’s permanent, not linear time, or the trajectory of a love affair, or a single mortal life. That could be what Auden was getting at.
Does this mesh or jive with Bruce Lee’s statements? Cyclical ways of being could be another means of remaining formless, becoming the cup.
Something to think about, for sure.
Also, while poking around the internet just now, I discovered that there were actually TWO sequels made to Before Sunrise, not just the one that I’ve seen. So now I have that to anticipate.
Tonight, I’m thankful for access to clean drinking water, and all the basic necessities, and luxuries like the scented body wash and fragrance mist and hand sanitizer I got tonight (I had earned a reward and saved almost $17).
I’m grateful for little things like being able to get clean ice water any time I go out to eat, as we did this evening, when I treated my mom and myself to some fancy French toast platters for dinner. Being able to go out to eat at all on occasion is a real treat.
I’m also thankful for the wisdom of the artists and seers who came before me, and who are living now, down to the people who write the paper fortunes I store in my painted Buddha statue.
For friendships like the one I had and presumably still have with my high school bestie. And conversations that meander and wind up at strange hypotheticals. Inspiration in all its multitude of fluid forms, wherever and whenever I find it.
It’s already technically tomorrow here. I think I’ll share this post in the AM again. Have a wonderful day, everyone! And don’t forget to hydrate. 🙂
All the Bright and Sparkly Things 
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