Excerpt

THE FLUID EDGE

When I was a child, my parents and teachers taught me about personal boundaries – which I still think of in terms of my “swimsuit area.” Partly because it's on a childhood trip to the pool that we learn about these boundaries. We change clothes in a room with naked people, probably with one of our parents (who we see naked and never forget it) and we learn not to stare and point at others in their un-tanned vulnerability. Including that one really old dude in every changing room who really wants to be seen. Ladies, I honestly don't know if there's any equivalent, and I don't want to know. In modern times we see notices saying not to pretend to talk on your cell-phone while taking sneaky pictures in the locker-room (wow, I'm glad I grew up in the eighties!). Then we're at the pool or beach and everyone is in this strange state between dressed and undressed. You're sort-of in clothes as you step up, but then as you wade or lower yourself in, there's that moment of yeep! when the water does its, I dunno, the water-version of a handshake greeting and you know the water does not respect your boundaries. The water has known your nakedness.

As children going for a swim, we were told to wait forty minutes after eating before getting in, so that lunch will stay inside the bounds of our bodies. And we sometimes saw clever signs saying something like “Our Ool doesn't have any P in it.” But kids pee in the pool anyway – for children it's a chance to experiment with legal boundaries, prohibitions... Will something happen? Will the Olice show up? Nope. Except the person next to you might ask if the water got warmer. And... Not to get disgusting here, but when we actually think about it, we know that all the water in the pool (and the ocean) is urine, every drop has been drank and sprayed by whales and jellyfish, elephants, orangutans, dogs and cats and squirrels and people. All of the world's water has been urine at some point, and even his imperial majesty the Pope can't bless that away. Babies get baptized, and that water in the baptismal font has passed through bodies – maybe Jesus, maybe Muhammad, Mother Teresa, Sitting Bull, maybe Madonna. And a tyrannosaurus rex. Any drop of water, or look at a single snowflake, think about where it's been, it'll blow your mind. “I was the blood of Caesar, I was sweated out by Muhammad Ali, I was a tear of Harriet Tubman, and I got pissed off by Eminem.”

I'm not here to gross you out – all the world's water has passed through animals, but nature also cleans the water, with evaporation into the clouds above, and also the water-treatment facilities we call “plants.” Rain comes down, then passes through roots and accumulates in berries, coconuts, tomatoes, onions, nature's way of purifying the water. I would not drink a cup of rain-water from this area, but an apple grows in my front yard and I'll eat it, I know nature has purified that water. Ironically, the water in our baptismal fountains has been cleaned by forbidden fruit.

Our bodies also process water – we're like power-plants, factories, we constantly need clean water coming in and constantly have waste-water coming out. Not just from our swimsuit areas but from every inch of our bodies. Our parents and teachers taught us that our bodies are solid, our skin a boundary between what's inside us and what's outside. But none of us here is made out of diamond - our skin is a bag for holding water, and the bag has millions of holes in it. Water is passing through my skin, you are breathing it. Water is passing through your skin, I am breathing it. We are exchanging water right now. When you smell someone, that's not a supernatural spirit in the air, it's water from their body carrying flakes of skin into your nose and lungs and blood. Also I sometimes spit when I talk, so if your mouth is gaping open in shock right now you might want to move to the back row.

Our parents and teachers taught us about boundaries, but in a biological sense those boundaries don't exist – we are all continuous, connected by water. Not just people, all organic life – plants, trees, fungi, bacteria, animals, Keith Richards, cockroaches, fish, that smelly guy you sat next to on the bus (who might have been Keith Richards, I don't know). The Ojibwe scholar and activist Melissa Nelson wrote, we “are not separate from the environment. We are the environment! ...With every bite of food we eat, every drop of water we drink, every breath of air we inhale, we are on the fluid edge of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘me’ and the ‘environment,’ the person and the planet, and the individual and humanity.” Water respects no boundaries – especially the artificial and cultural ones we make up for ourselves. We want to close ourselves off from nature, but it's inside us. Rivers don't care about our imaginary borders, and even if we build a wall against Mexico, those rivers will defy us by still connecting us. We are all from and of water.

[Etc. - this goes on.]