Water is never water only. Water’s weighty with solutes. Water’s suffusing vapor. Water’s foaming surfspray. Water’s crackling iceshelves. Water’s pregnant stormclouds. Water encircles our senses. With water, we see/hear/smell/touch/taste at once, without working overtime. Water ensorcels. With water, we witness all about us the shifting states of energy/matter that other materials mask in apparent rigidity or lapsing liquidity or unreliable transparency. Water lives, like no other substance, always toward the future.

My mother taught me the word water as a part of her pregnancy when I was near to turning six. Water became, then, about becoming. Or was water always about becoming, long before for me? Was it for you? You grew up, like me, on the shoreline…water was always not just the small water of sink/bath/pool/rain/drip/drip/drip, but for you like me water was always the big water of ocean/wave/undertow/flood/crash/crash/crash.

Do we miss what water means, then, you and I lucky enough to be immersed in all of it all the time? I don’t think we do. John, who writes with me about Dylan, thinks we might miss the beach, though. Overwhelming evidence for this, I suggest, rests in these words that are my most favored among the countless words I valorize by Bob the Bard:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond skies with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there
Other times it’s only me

My experiences of time and space and self and other always refract and distort and distend at the beach, twisted and stretched and freed in this extraordinary place that’s like a living rubato passage to which I return again and again and again for respite and rejuvenation within the tune of my fast–unfurling life—and no one’s words sketch this feeling nearly so well as this person from the frigid Iron Range of upper Minnesota who wrote both of these passages while deep in the swells of big–city superstar tumult. So yes, you and I, we might miss the beach.

But we don’t miss the water. We water babies crawl toward the sea of becoming, you and me. We are hatched by hearing Freire, across time, paint with his words the vista of human vocation, the vocation of becoming other than what we have been and are now. We are water, for Freire, humans always shifting shapes, never being only what we seem, beings who live most fully in the present not when we live for our future (Dewey would shed tears over that, wouldn’t want it) but when we live toward our future.

Dylan…Freire…Dewey…they all feel the pull of the eternal transition, the enduring becoming in which we are water. Through these, you and I are linked. Emerson feels it, too. When you reread Freire, please also read an Emerson essay called “Circles.” It opens with a poem, one beautifully entwined in theme with the Dylan passages above that on their surface seem like separate lines.

Thanks for your enthusiasm that sustains our relational arc in time.