No Such Thing as Still Water

I do not try to catch my ideas, or else I find they slip through my fingers.

Like running water–like a wild stream–coursing downwards between the rocks. Churning and turning, leaves bob and tumble along the foaming surface and sand swirls beneath them.

These are my ideas: this wild stream, this ever-coursing. The movement of the water is chaotic, we cannot predict where each particle ends up and as the stream weaves back and forth between the rocks and the shore, as it bounces and bubbles and foams, it splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms.

One thousand times a second. Who knows, maybe more. The water mingles and mixes and so do my ideas run across and through one another, both the same ideas–the same stream–and different, ever-changing and ever-changed by their passage through this analogy.

Analogy, no less an allegory, no less a speaking of things hidden from view yet visible to the watcher of the stream who perceives his thoughts rushing downwards, ever-changing, ever-chaotic. And the He that is Me knows it is impossible to collect these ideas, even in a bucket.

For the water outside of the stream is nothing like the water within. The water outside is stagnant and separate. It contains, perhaps, a hint of the source, but nothing like the memory of being one with the stream. And so the idea, like the water, must be poured back.

I do not try to catch my ideas, I merely watch them and am aware of them and am aware of the sensation of gravity and momentum that propels them and me forward, down, weaving complex patterns between the rocks. I do not try to catch my ideas and pour them into glasses and say: look what I have imagined, taste the water of my dreams.

I merely watch the stream and am aware of it and, in turn, from that swirling, ever-downwards chaos, describe the thought-forms I see reflected on the surface. Is that the sun that shines through the trees or the illumination of my intellect?

There is no such thing as still water.