Chiquita is a great gal of 70, tiny, and full of energy. She boards about 30 horses on her land which is a beautiful swatch of land in NW Georgia, full of rolling hills, water, and sky. Her farm is a non-profit therapy ranch where people and horses come for rest and revival, and it's pretty magical.
One of the exercises she asked us to do was to find several things, sort of like a scavenger hunt, and bring them back to where we were meeting underneath the roof of an open barn near her pond. Among other things, one of the things we were to bring was water. I was pretty irritated by this whole thing because I thought it was a total waste of time, but I thought, what the fuck, I'll humor the old broad and go ahead and just do the damned exercise. So, I dutifully went and gathered my stuff, and came back to the table. Then we were supposed to "spend time" with our finds and write down any "messages that they had transmitted to us". Oh, please. Give me a fucking break.
So. I sat my ass down and began contemplating. The first thing was horsehair, which I wrote some drivel about, then the next thing was a nut, and I wrote some more drivel. Then rock, which I at least thought was useful because it contained vital minerals that could be used to feed plants when it broke down enough. Then the next thing was a feather, which actually surprised me because I remembered that the irridescence doesn't come from oils on the feather, but rather is a refraction from the actual structure of the feather itself. Which I thought was rather cool: the feather transmits something that it itself does not possess. Which is a very neat trick indeed.
Then water. We had had several tremendous rains the previous night and they had been deafening on the tin roof of the open pole barn that we were sleeping under, which was wonderful to experience. As I began pondering water, I thought to myself, OK, well, it can dissolve stuff, and it can carry stuff along, like in a stream. Then I started thinking about water wearing away rock over eons. Caves. The Grand Canyon. Water in the form of rain reforming the Earth's continents. And the most amazing thing I thought of was that it does this using the single drop as its basic unit. All those single drops together in uncountable multitude, each doing one teeny, tiny bit of work, like the deafening rain drumming on our roof: one drop only makes a tiny plink, but hundreds of thousands of them makes a sound that you have to shout over.
Water which gets evaporated, carried up into the air, condenses into microscopic droplets, then coalesce into raindrops big enough to fall. And when they do, gravity conveys energy to do the work.
Drop by drop we get streams, rivers, seas. Thunderclouds, suspended drops, weigh as much as several thousand elephants each, and yet they float in the sky until they rain down.
As I sat there, totally involved now in the exercise, my irritation completely gone, I began wondering to myself what is the human equivalent of a drop of water, the one basic unit that is large enough to do some useful work? How many people does it take, when unified of purpose, to reform the landscape, political or otherwise? It starts with a single water molecule bumping into another one to form that microscopic droplet. What's our critical mass?
Even the most stubborn rock, granite, wears away in the face of unyielding water over time. Nothing can stand in its way given sufficient persistence. That gives me great hope. The exercise ended up being one of the more powerful things I've ever done.
And I'll have to admit that maybe, just maybe, those things actually did transmit some actual messages to me.
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