Hydrogen Twice Oxygen

It hasn't been this cold in a regular way this winter, yet. But this night, this cold followed rains and warm weather, sun beating down on white surfaces, exposing something underneath, releasing torrents down the side of houses and roads. I saw the swollen Assabet River this week, spring flow in January. Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice. Icicles are different, though. More like river channels and those wrinkles that start to appear, they are products of history, the frozen reminder of past processes. In this case, a snow and a thaw. There is a channel running from my roof along my house, across the canopy porch roof and right down my wind chimes. It runs like a small stream in rainstorms. It freezes in time after a winter thaw. We are told that it is the charge, ultimately, that makes the stuff of rivers and icicles so special. It is a plus and minus molecule, it can hold its surface better than most liquids allowing the rapid accretion of solid from liquid in an atmosphere we can tolerate. It also dissolves most anything that comes its way. For these reason, water is truly life's molecule, a carrier of goods for living systems and also a part of the architecture. These rippled icicles contain ancient molecule, frozen in time before me. Were they in the Pacific last Christmas? Part of a tree leaf a decade before. A person? The possibilities are all there. We know this much, they have traveled great distances, seen more worlds than you and I can imagine, and will continue their journey into the future as far as it reaches, cutting channels, pacing time time, providing life. In these moments of noticing the realm beyond my own motivations, I am both astounded and grateful. But I am also made aware of the dangers posed by consciousness itself: That this gift may fail to deliver on its deepest potential, leaving us prisoners of our own redundant selves, navel-gazers, unaware of the miracle hanging from our wind chimes.

Of that realm, where we mostly abide, a strange stagnation has set in, a calm, not quite calm, but quiet, not quite quiet, where it is as if everyone is holding their breath uncertain which way things are directed. Waiting on fate, almost, as if the end were already decided. The envelope please... Waiting, worrying. A scholar I know has called this age a razor's edge between what we knew of politics and culture and global interactions and what is to come. He says September 11 is the pivot moment and since then, though we all still proceed as if nothing at all has changed very much, nothing is any longer the same. Perhaps culture is like water, never the same place twice, and yet always carrying the burdens of the past. Cutting channels and leaving marks, but itself ephemeral. It is nowhere long enough to find permant home, but it takes all that it washes over to new places. It is still too soon to tell, but the possibility exists that the waters of cultural change will take us elsewhere as well, and we may look up after all and see what is to be seen.