FOCUS | From the Editor
WATER PLAYS A DOMINANT ROLE in our inner and outer lives. Our bodies are composed of about sixty percent water, and water covers three-quarters of the planet on which we live, as C. Scott Ryan explains in his essay here on Aryuvedic teachings on water. We know that life originated in the oceans; and according to many spiritual traditions, much—perhaps all— that is, arose from water (“the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”).
Our responses to water are ancient and deep. As long as humanity has looked toward the higher, water has played an integral part in sacred ritual, in libation, baptism, and cleans- ing. Bathing itself may be a spiritual act, advises Thomas Moore in this Summer 2009 issue of PARABOLA. And in myth and fairytale, water exerts an energy all its own, harboring within its liquid depths archetypal creatures both earthly and supernatural, like the beautiful and fatal rusalki of Russian lore, explored here in an essay by Jane L. Mickelson.
Yet for most of us today water is more commodity than mystery. Beauty Water. Fitness Water. Smart Water. Bling H20. These are four of the more than three thousand brands of bottled water sold today in over 130 countries (China, for instance, produces sixty brands, including New Feeling Water and Chivalry Water.) Bottled water packages our hopes and dreams right on the labels of the tens of billions of units sold—in non-degradable plastic containers—each year.
At the same time, nearly a billion people on the planet lack access to safe water, and it’s likely that some of the wars of this and subsequent centuries will be fought over fresh water. Our planet is in the grip of a water crisis, and it is a crisis of the spirit as well as of the body. This issue of PARABOLA is dedi- cated to exploring sacred wellsprings and innermost currents.
JEFF ZALESKI
