It is the most valuable--simple--abused resource for humanity and ecosystems.
I know water fuels everything, biotic and abiotic alike.
It is the catalyst that fuels reactions in a dendritic down-sloped laboratory all around the world.
Water produces algae, insects, and fish for infinite biotic energy, and it wears down granite, limestone, and sandstone over bajillions of years.
Water is how the earth moves. Grows, decays, rubs away. A yearlong time lapse of one stream would breath in (raging and overflowing) and out (boney and dry). Then, if you lined up all the world's stream time lapses, they would make the most awesome wave. A spring storm crescendo here, summer doldrum diminuendo there.
I also know water is highly reflective. I don't mean of our ignorant neglect--we don't know what we've lost. But we can see the moon's sliver on the darkest night and the stars' glimmer with the moon at its height. By day, depending on the angle of the sun, streams reflect pure black or white. If you get lost, you can follow a streams' tendrils by day or night.
I never understood one thing about water. How to hold one water? If I could just hold one water, I could have an everlasting vital--simple--resource for breath and light. But I know water is a covalent continuum, and you can never hold the same water you held a minute ago.
One way I cope with stress is to play a game where I imagine myself perched on the slippery rocks in the river just down the road, or someplace further away. There's fish, particles, and insects incognito all around me, and it just keeps going. Sometimes the game is going back to that branch between my zipping road bike and the tiny creek I always follow. Spiders, insects and caterpillars there all cruising along still. That's how I reassure myself that everything is fine. Island Lake, there still, just like it always will. I can stress hard that my peers are constantly out-succeeding me, but I can also take myself back to an alpine lake I ran to last weekend, or the weekend before. I've been so blessed to chase so much trail this summer that instead of falling off a cliff the moment before sleep, I find myself about to biff it right before my dancing feet can lull me to sleep.
I was born on summer's solstice. Once a friend told me summer made me golden. Regardless of whether I simply tan well, or because I was born into long light and growth, it's a compliment that has always stuck with me. I literally measure my life by summers. When I think of all the beautiful places I have had the honor to visit this summer, I am tempted to write out: this has life the been summer of my best, but I can't. I have to scramble it because I know it actually just keeps getting better.
