I am tasked with writing a water suite of sorts, for an art installation called "Naiad". The majority of the work must be done in the next few weeks even though the opening isn't until October. My process though always requires that I come into the songs organically, through thoughts around meaning, around conjuncture, through some unique perspective. The music has been on my mind, half formed ideas, that move, fluid and wanting within me. I hear little droplets but have not yet come into the fullness of it. It would have been more apt to be writing this when the storms were flinging water at my windows, offering it up to me in rivers of sky streams. Instead I sit within the heat cracked day, already warm when it isn't even 7:00 am. I try to conjure in my mind the ghosts of water in the land, held to shape and form within bark and leaf, within each dry stalk of grass. The world is mostly water, not just the vast oceans and veins of water beneath the ground, as priceless as liquid gold. Even our bodies are barely held water, corralled into a type of stasis by the edgings of flesh. So maybe when I look out my window and see nothing but the land, what I am seeing rather is water hidden in structure, and I wish I could touch each static cast, break the meniscus of being and transmute all to it's watery truth. I like the thought of water rippling beneath the shimmering heat of the day. So I contemplate water. The endless cycles of falling and acceptance, the pooling collection that rushes ceaselessly in river shed, and sighs in tidal breath. I contemplate the eternity of it, a circle forever closing upon itself. There is comfort in knowing that the tears I cry were once an ancient sea, were once the cradle of life. I wonder at how connected we truly are, the droplets in me having passed through your lips, intimate within you, how your tears might now be mine, such that all our sorrows and joys are one, vibrating within the deeply conscious being called water.
