The old master of China, in the little book that the West calls the Book of the Way, says that the highest good is like water. It benefits all things and does not contend with them. It settles in the low places that others despise, and so it is near to the Way. Nothing under heaven, he says elsewhere, is softer or weaker than water, and yet nothing is better at overcoming what is hard and strong.
The saying is usually read as advice for conduct: be supple, yield, do not fight what cannot be fought. It is good advice, and the fellowship takes it. But I have washed my hands in cold water before dawn for twenty-two years, and I think water has something deeper to teach. It can teach us who we are.
What Does Water Look Like?
It is a child's question, and it has no answer. Pour water into a cup and it takes the curve of the cup. But that is not the shape of water; it is only what water is doing for a while. Let it run out into a river and it may be fast and loud over the stones, or slow and wide and quiet in the plain. But that is not what water is either. That is an event.
Add heat and it boils, and it can scald you. Take the heat away and it hardens into ice, and it can freeze you. Leave it temperate and it is the most refreshing thing in the world. None of these is water's true state. Each is only a moment in time. Water is simply itself, taking on whatever state, event, or experience it meets, and remaining water through all of them.
Much like you.
You Are Not the Cup
You are not the situation you are in this morning. You are not the event you are going through, however loud it is. You are not any one state of being in time: not the anger, which is a temperature; not the grief, which is a cup you have been poured into for a season; not the fear, which is ice; not even the joy, which is the river running fast over the stones and will widen and slow again. You are the life that passes through all of these and witnesses them. You are the water.
The ancient witnesses say that the Essenes held the soul to be immortal and the body to be its passing dwelling, and the teaching of The Soul and Its Journey follows what they said. A student does not have to settle every question about the soul's journey to take the first step of it, which is this: to stop mistaking the shape of the moment for the shape of the self. People who cannot take that step are tossed by every state that comes. People who can are still hot and cold and fast and slow, as water is, but they are not lost in it.
This is what the Still Lamp trains. One sits, and the states come and go, and one learns, slowly, to be the one who watches them come and go. It is not coldness. Water that knows itself is not less wet.
At the Washing
The desert community washed in living water, as the page The Washing in Living Water describes, and the Community Rule is careful to say what the water could and could not do. A man is not made clean by the waters of washing, it says, if he will not turn; it is by a humble and upright spirit that his flesh is cleansed when it is sprinkled with the water of purification. The water does its work on the one who is willing to be changed by it.
Here is a small practice for the morning washing, for those who would like one. As the water runs over your hands, name the shape you are in this morning, plainly and without judgment. This is a cup of worry. This is a boiling. This is ice. Then say, silently: this is a shape, and not water. Let the water run off your hands, and let the shape run off with it, or not; it will pass in its own time either way. Then dry your hands and go to the watch.
It will not always feel like anything. Some mornings it will feel like a great deal. Either way you will have practiced, once more, the difference between what you are going through and who is going through it.
The Low Places
There is one more thing water knows. It seeks the low places. It does not climb; it goes down, into the valley and the cistern and the root, and that is where it does its good. The old master saw in this the humility of the wise. The Essenes, who despised riches and kept their garments until they fell apart, would have understood him.
And the teacher of the Way, sitting tired at a well in Samaria at noon, asked a woman for a drink and then offered her another kind of water: whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. A well within, that does not take the shape of the day, and does not run dry when the day is dry. That, I think, is what we are reaching for every morning when we put our hands under the tap. The water on our hands is a reminder of the water we are.
The Lection says it in one line, and I have nothing to add to it: water takes the shape of every cup, and is the shape of none.