Image by Anna from Pixabay

There is a leak in my roof.

The weather which is most hazardous to my little English roof comes down in ‘stair rods.’ A stair rod is a long brass rod which used to keep stair carpets in place. MR James intimates that the ambitious Bishop of Barchester may have removed a stair rod to remove the last encumbent of the Bishopric from his post, to create a vacancy for himself (once the last Bishop had slipped on the carpet and broken his 96 year old neck). Just occasionally, here on the outskirts of London, the rain seems to be a series of uncompromising water-rods which pound our rooves and swell our rivers, slap the skin and overwhelm wind screen wipers.

Direction is its chief weapon. Some days it won’t come in at all; others it drives and and we are sent scampering off for large bowls to catch all. Water, water everywhere.

We have a story about water causing calamity in a nearby market town, Reading. A brook runs under the town, covered up many years ago. It is named Holy Brook as it served Reading Abbey and its mills. Once it had been enclosed the inhabitants of the town quite put it out of their mind. A little newsagents was built over Holy Brook, and during a storm the water swelled and the floor collapsed into the Brook, taking a woman with it, down into the depths of the underground stream.

The very nature of water saved her life: that, and the voluminous crinoline petticoats with uncompromising bone structure, which trapped air and kept the good lady buoyant until she emerged in the open air next to the Abbey. She survived to tell the tale.

Water can cause the devil of a stir. Yet how many of us pay well over the odds to live next to water? What greater silence and peace can we have than by its side? Carl Jung would not have lived anywhere else than by water, and his beautiful play-castle, Bollingen, rests next to the Lake Zurich, is a fit archetype storage facility, a story-tower, a quantum of possibilities. Conversely water is a deadly force, its ability to dissolve all we know as everyone but Noah and his family witnessed- there are so many faces to this substance so vital to planet Earth.

The leak in my roof precipitates a new look at the phrase ‘Mind Like Water’. “Mizu No Kokuro”, the phrase from Zen Buddhism, translates “Heart Like Water” or “a heart like still water.” It is a state where you just sit, and all the waves and tsunamis and even ripples of life still themselves, and things become calm. It might even be true to say, you step outside time.

Yet that glassy calm in water – that time-stasis – how often do you see it, really? Even in Winston Churchill’s carp pond at Chartwell, the carp create eddies and ripples in the paradise he designed so painstakingly.

Someone asked me very recently and with infinite kindness: “How are your tribulations a gift?” The Universe is not a bland place. Planet Earth specialises in the myriad moods of water: the waterfall; the tsunami; the river torrent as the salmon fight their way upstream and the village pond, where the ducks and geese and coots create a tapestry of seeming domestic balance. And yes, Planet Earth creates water so abundant that it visits me in stair rods, and sometimes enters my roof to drop unannounced into my room.

And maybe, just maybe, our hearts, embedded in a body which is some 55-60 per cent water, emulate all its different moods. For everything there is a season, and perhaps we need to learn to canoe with the rapids, and picnic at the pond, to surf with the pure energy of wave, and to fall back and gather ourselves, our whole selves, just as a wave does once it has crashed on the shore.

And what of the leak? Each of us would have a different answer. For me, our hearts might be called upon to be water which turns up somewhere unexpected. After all, water can go so many places nothing else can.

I have vintage copy of the Tao Te Ching. It is delicious. A little cloth-green hardback published in London, it is more than 60 years old, and I love its translation by Ch’u Ta-Kao.

Chapter 8 says: “Water is beneficient to all things, but does not contend. It stays in places which others despise.”

And that, I think, is the chief superpower of a mind like water. It does not pick fights : it moves around obstructions, taking its powerful current onwards, regardless of the qualities of chaos the egoic world can effect, even if that means going in places others would shy away.

We get to have minds like still ponds, and waves, and stair-rod rain, and puddles, and every other reflection of a stunning little blue-green planet set up to foster life. But beneath, there’s an underground river more numinous than we may ever dare dream.

And the ocean refuses no river.