What is it?  Trying to answer this question produces every form of facial distortion imaginable.  We flail at some kind of definition.  “It’s a gas.”  “It’s H2O.”  “It’s wet.”  “You can make ice out of it.”  Hmmm.  But what is it - REALLY??  I know, I struggled just like you’re struggling to define something so essential to life that no life is possible without it.

Of interest, as fetuses we start out life about 99 percent water.  Almost totally a liquid.  We’re about 90 percent water when we’re born (yet starting to move toward a more solid substance).  At 25 we’re still 70 percent water.  Even as an old person we’re probably somewhere around 50 percent water.  As Masaru Emoto writes in his epic The Hidden Messages in Water - “...Throughout our lives we exist mostly as water.”  And still we struggle to define what it is - what we are - what life itself it - and what the real "messages" water carries within it are that we're missing.

Everyone I’ve talked to tries to explain water in strictly physical terms.  Yet water remains the great unsolved mystery - the true mystical enigma of the planet Earth.  Dr. Emoto - who has studied water for decades - writes “to understand water is to understand the cosmos, the marvels of nature, and life itself.”  So there's a galactic grandeur to it that we're missing.  He claims we've reached a point in history where it's now essential for the survival of all life on Earth that we begin listening to and then acting on the life-sustaining "messages" within water.

Dr. Emoto freezes water and then photographs the crystals that form.  He has only been doing this for a few years as technologies became available to allow such studies.  When the water is mostly pure or unpolluted with chemicals - it forms beautiful crystals.  And all around the world the water from the tap or wells produces different shaped crystals.  Yet when chemicals are added - such as chlorine - no crystals form, or those that do are badly distorted.  Malformed crystals reveal sick water, which produces sick people.  In effect, the water is dead-on-arrival.  The tap water in Tokyo and London produce no crystals.  Yet the tap water in New York City produces beautiful crystals.  

How water is cared for by various municipalities determines whether it will form crystals or not.  No two water crystals are alike - just as no two snow crystals are alike.  It’s impossible for our imaginations to grasp the fact that everywhere in the world water has its own local characteristics based on its infinite capacity to form unique one-of-a-kind and thus identifiable crystals.  Call them water 'fingerprints.'  And perhaps the most startling aspect of all is that water appears to have a kind of consciousness - and memory.  In my next post I’ll try and flesh out a few more of these controversial theories about water - and how those "messages" apply to wilderness and Ultralight Wilderness Toilet Co.