Water is in our bodies and in our language
There is a fascinating concept that we never left the water.
I first encountered this by listening to this wonderfully entertaining and illuminating talk by the delightful Hank Green – you can watch the full video here. In short, what Hank talks about is marine biology leaving the oceans to adapt to living on land, and specifically vertebrates that made the massively difficult and important migration in the Devonian period – roughly between 360 and 390 million years ago – read more about it here. What is so fascinating is that when our ancient ancestors left the water, in order to survive on land, what they had to do was to take the water with them in their cells. And that is why us humans, to this day are so squishy and wet – because we had our start living in the element of water and our bodies are still carrying the ocean around with us!
The delightful, brilliant and hilarious Hank Green wearing the shirt he had designed.
This delights me no end 😀 I often think about this – how we have to keep our eyeballs moisturised, all our mucous membranes that have to be kept wet for us to stay alive. This also makes me think of how we use descriptions of water to talk about our own states. How the realisation of our inherent wetness is so encoded into our being and our language that we don’t even really think about it, but it is there.
We talk about being in the flow when things are going well and smoothly for us. When luck is on our side, when our preparations are paying off, we are intuiting exactly where to go and what to day. This idea taken to it’s height of quality is being in a flow state – when we are 100% surfing the wave of everything falling into place, being in the right place at the right time, being one with our powers and lifting to almost a supernatural state of integration with all level of environment. Going with the flow makes everything easier for ourselves and others, yields no stress, and puts us in a place of calm and enjoyment-
See what I did there? Surfing the wave to describe when we are on top of things and avoiding the difficulties that are implied when you are at the bottom.
Waves of pleasure or waves of guilt that ripple through our watery bodies.
Looking at the unpleasant sides of being watery, we can describe things as being stagnant when there is a lack of moving forward or decay of quality. Stagnant thoughts or stagnant energy in a relationship are never good in the same way that stagnant water becomes putrid.
Swinging back around to happier states of being watery, we talk about someone with a bubbly personality to mean that they are friendly and exciting to be around, or we speak of someone being effervescent to describe the quality of someone that is motivating and of high spirits.
We can’t talk about bodily fluids without thinking about Hippocrates’s theory of The Four Humors where the entirety of the human’s wellness – physically, mentally and emotionally, depended on the balance of the four fluids:
- Blood: Associated with air and spring and a sanguine personality which is optimistic, enthusiastic, and cheerful.
- Yellow Bile: Associated with fire and summer and a choleric temperament which means ambitious, passionate, but quick-tempered and aggressive.
- Black Bile: Associated with earth and autumn and a melancholic mood which is analytical and creative, but can be deeply depressed or sad.
- Phlegm: Associated with water and winter and the phlegmatic personality that can. described as calm, apathetic, and listless.
Source of The Four Humours material: Washington University Bernard Becker Medical Library
Well, I hope I’ve given you something to think about!
As I continue my journey of learning and discovery, I am ever more drawn to water and ever more fascinated with the role it plays in our lives as human.
Cheers! With lots of love from the Deep 😀
