Most mornings I sit in bed with a cup of tea and look at clouds and the trees in our garden. There seem to have been some beautifully different skies in recent times.
This morning I was watching the shape of the clouds move with the wind stream. My child’s brain somehow expected the whole pattern to move in unison but it doesn’t do that does it? What we see as a pattern with some shading, hinting at 3D, is of course multiple clumps of clouds and different heights and distances. They move independently on the air streams where each one is. Everything around us is more complicated than we remember to think.
That’s not all the cloud complications. The sun and air movements change temperatures and clouds can change consistency and even state. A thin whispy cloud might suddenly become transparent and disappear or the opposite. I realised I have spent my life staring at water in all its forms and trying to catch some of its subtleties.
That reminded me of Elif Shafak’s ‘There are Rivers in the Sky’, which uses water in various ways in the imagery of the story. One theme is the amazing strong electrochemical bond in H2O. She plays with the idea of how long water has ‘lived’ and what it might have ‘witnessed’.
Suddenly I was intrigued by how strong that bond is. First the bond is at molecule level, so an individual drop of water has much weaker bonds and molecules can wander off at any time. That molecular bond is magically strong though and people don’t fully understand it. There are many competing theories and we really want to be able to break the bond efficiently, in terms of energy and cost, so we can unlock the hydrogen. We always want to move on to the next solution. There is a lot of water about but we are not good at managing it. From prehistory on, especially when we band together in bigger groups and let some people get too powerful, we have ruined the useful water in one place and moved on to the next. We are doing it with greater frequency every day. Many improvement are made but they are outweighed by selfish and badly thought out decisions.
It pleased me enormously to find that the lower half of my window view does splits the water molecules all the time. The plants there use photosynthesis and the power of the sun to achieve the job. I love finding out just how far behind the world we are in terms of inventiveness. We haven’t made a great job with our power and nosiness so far. There will come a point when nature stops rescuing us.
