We burst upon the land as rain

Living Waters

It's easy to think of ocean water as alive.

A cubic meter of surface water has an estimated 100,000   phytoplankton plus a mix of about a billion bacteria, nannoplankton, zooplankton and protozoa, all busy focusing sunlight to the task of rearranging the atoms of sea into themselves and then passing it on again.

Little whirlpools of life, keeping their essence while letting Sea flow right through them.

Not much more of a task to realize a coral, or a whale, is a modified flow of sea water.

Rising up onto the land

Life originated in Sea, learned all its tricks of becoming there, and only then began the even more complex task of learning how to venture out of the sea onto the land.

This wasn't easy. Life is essentially reorganized sea water. To leave the sea, watery life had to devise complex control systems to preserve its essence while allowing water to continue its steady flow through it, never getting out of perfect fluid and ionic balance. Never drying out or flooding. Life needed to think up waterproof skins, kidneys, valves, sphincters, pumps of various kinds, and circulatory systems.

Even fresh water creatures had to come up with special techniques to maintain their salt content in their evolutionary migration upstream from the oceans.

The edge of the sea, a very hard place to live, being dried out for hours, submerged for hours, washed with wind, rain, and waves.

Living beings on land are like self-organizing tide pools. Small containers of sea growing, moving, becoming more complex each day. Each egg and sperm still meet in a fluid nearly identical in composition to seawater. 

The Sea cycles through all life

All 300 million cubic miles of water on Earth, making up her oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers and water vapor, circulate through the water cycle of the planet about once every three thousand years.  

Some 300 cubic miles of water evaporate every day from the sea, rising up over the land as clouds, then raining down to flow through the rivers, and through the watersheds of plants and animals and bacteria, eventually returning to the ocean again.

About every two million years, every drop of water passes through all the animal and vegetable life on Earth.

Today, the land is flooded with life in a million different styles. About 40,000 visible animals live in a cubic foot of fertile soil.

The air is also filled with microscopic life,  aerial plankton of viruses, bacteria, pollen, insects, birds and bats rising all the way up to the stratosphere.

Even the clouds and the rain are alive with creatures.

Wherever life exists, it is an image at the focus of awareness as sun and sea flow through the lens of mind .