TREASURES IN HEAVEN
INA OTZKO“Man will not perish from the Earth! At the darkest hour his eyes will be opened. The Earth and the fullness thereof are his, but not to destroy. In no celestial register is it written how far we must go or how much we must endure. It is we, we ourselves, who decide”
Henry Miller
Stand still like the hummingbird
REFLECTIONS ON WATER
Water is the first haven, the first hemisphere we are aware of, water is our first heaven.
Water is the condition for life on earth, and the element through which we enter earthly life. Metaphorically speaking, water is a gate: – the amniotic fluid is a transformational gateway into life – and it is a mystery. We constantly ask what happens after death, where we go from here, but what about where we came from? What were the waters from which we first arose?
Water connects us to the past; the eternal flow of water can be said to erase the division between religion and science. It is a fact that the same water runs through us now as before, both the same and transformed, just as we ourselves are the same and different at any given point in time. As it is the same water that has been with us from the beginning of time, it has qualities both of time and eternity.
In the great chain of being, water is the seamless link connecting us to all other living beings, to all other life.
Water can mirror our moods, but it also draws us out of ourselves. It can stir us. It resembles the ways we shift and change, but it also represents the other, is something completely different. Water is a fearful element as well as a soothing one.
There is something both intensely human and inhuman about water.
We are totally dependent on water. When the water around us is threatened, polluted, tainted, so is the water that runs through us; this threat literally runs in our blood.
When water runs short, our energy stops short. All living energy hardens and crumbles when water dries up.
The rushing sound we hear on a barely detectable wavelength in the dead of night, in the midst of silence, instantly recognisable – is that the sound of our own blood rushing through the body, or the sound of the primeval water from whence that body came? It is perhaps an echo of both, an underlying stream of connectedness.
Water carries memories – and it does not. It is oblivious to our experience, but so often we associate the shining moments of our lives with water: the running stream, the running river, the sea and its shores, light on water, water by night. The presence of water is overwhelming, and it has a language – a musical language. Did we learn music, invent music, from listening to water? We do not know, but we can be certain that water carried our voices across.
THE BLUE TYRRHENIAN SEA
Once upon a time a ship set out with a cargo of blue glass. But it was caught in a storm just off the coast and sank
In sunlight, at a particular angle, the sun’s rays will bring forth a reflection, a blue flash beneath the waves
Texts by Hanne Bramness (Translated from the Norwegian with the help of Anna Reckin)
Treasures in Heaven, The Tyrrhenian Sea 2018−2019.
© IO Productions 2020