WE ALL BECOME WATER.
WE ALL BECOME WATER.
Different Currents, One Ocean.
By Kāteb Shunnar.
I been thinking ’bout water lately. Not the kind sitting polite in a glass, minding its business. Nah, I’m talking ’bout water with somewhere to go. Water with memory. Water that done seen mountains, buried secrets beneath bridges, carried prayers past cities, and kept on moving like it heard somebody calling its name from somewhere beyond the horizon.
See, a river don’t need another river to understand its direction. The Mississippi got its own swagger. It bends around New Orleans like an old storyteller who done lived too long to rush the ending muddy, wide, mysterious, carrying pieces of places we may never see. Up north it knew another sky, another temperature, another language of wind. By the time it reaches us, child, that water got stories in it.
The Nile flows different, and the Amazon moves different. The Congo carries depths darkness itself probably ain’t explored yet. The Ganges carries prayers. The Yangtze carries generations. The Rhine passes old cities and memories, while the Mekong keeps slipping through countries as though borders are suggestions somebody scribbled on paper. And none of ’em apologize for flowing differently.
Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe we spend too much of our lives trying to make everybody move like us, love like us, pray like us, heal like us, think like us, speak like us, and believe like us. Baby, even water said, “I ain’t doing all that.” Some rivers rush, while some wander. Some twist so much you’d swear they forgot where they were going. Some disappear underground, moving through darkness where nobody can see ’em, only to rise again miles away.
Sound familiar? Because some of us been underground too, still flowing, still moving, still alive beneath the dirt of disappointment, underneath heartbreak, grief, rejection, betrayal, and them seasons when everybody thought we had dried completely up. But water knows something we forget: hidden ain’t the same as gone.
A lake may look still, but underneath that quiet surface is a whole conversation currents touching currents, life moving where the eye can’t see it. And people like that too. You see somebody sitting quiet and assume nothing is happening. Meanwhile their spirit is crossing oceans, their ancestors whispering beneath the surface, and their soul rearranging furniture in rooms their mouth ain’t ready to open yet. That’s why I don’t trust stillness to mean emptiness.
The Great Lakes sit there looking almost like oceans themselves, holding enough water to humble the imagination. Yet even they eventually pour outward, finding the St. Lawrence and reaching toward the Atlantic. Imagine that: something so enormous still understanding, I am not complete by myself. Whew, some of us could use that sermon. We get a little success, little money, little title, couple folks know our name, and suddenly we acting like Lake Superior with the drain plugged up. Calm down, baby. You water too, and sooner or later, you gotta pour into something besides yourself.
Lake Victoria gives herself toward the Nile. Lake Tana sends water into the Blue Nile. Lake Baikal releases into rivers traveling toward the Arctic. Different places, different climates, different tongues, different histories, yet water keeps finding water. Ain’t that strange? Or maybe it ain’t strange at all. Maybe separation is the illusion.
Maybe the Creator scattered us like raindrops just to see whether we would remember the ocean. Maybe before we were names, nations, neighborhoods, races, religions, bank accounts, occupations, arguments, political lines, family grudges, and passwords we done forgot three times this week, we were something simpler: spirit, movement, breath, and water. Maybe somewhere inside us is an ancient memory of belonging to one another.
Because look at rain. A drop falls on a mountain and becomes a creek, while another falls thousands of miles away and becomes part of a river. One lands in the Amazon, one enters the Nile, one falls into the Mississippi, one kisses the Caribbean, and one freezes somewhere near the Arctic and waits years before moving again. They never meet, at least that’s what it looks like. But the sun reaches down and lifts them. They become vapor, then cloud, then rain, then river, then sea, then ocean, and then they begin again. Tell me that ain’t resurrection.
Water dies without dying. It disappears without leaving. It changes its name without changing its essence. Call it river, rain, snow, ice, mist, tears, sweat, or ocean; water probably somewhere laughing at us, saying, “Y’all really thought changing my name changed what I am?” And maybe our spirits work the same way.
Maybe this body is only one shape we taking for a while. Maybe death ain’t evaporation into nothingness, but transformation into something our eyes can’t follow. Maybe the people we love who crossed beyond this shoreline ain’t gone as far as we think. Maybe they became cloud, wind, memory, dream, that sudden smell of perfume in an empty room, that song coming on exactly when you needed it, or that feeling somebody standing beside you when ain’t nobody there. Maybe spirit, like water, refuses to disappear simply because we can no longer hold it in our hands.
And I wonder, if every river eventually surrenders its name when it reaches the ocean, what happens to all these names we fighting over? Mississippi becomes ocean. Amazon becomes ocean. Nile becomes ocean. Ganges becomes ocean. Congo becomes ocean. Yangtze becomes ocean. Fresh water meets salt, and neither asks who was more important before they touched. They simply become something larger.
Lord, imagine humans doing that. Imagine meeting somebody different without needing to conquer ’em. Imagine saying, Your current ain’t mine, but I recognize the water in you. You may come from mountains while I come from swamps. You may have moved through valleys while I crawled through mud. Your journey may be crystal clear, while mine might look like somebody stirred the whole bottom up with a broomstick. But keep flowing, because muddy water still reaches the sea.
And that right there is for somebody. You ain’t gotta be clear every day, and you ain’t gotta understand every bend. Sometimes life turns without asking permission. Sometimes the current gets rough. Sometimes you lose the shoreline and everything familiar starts disappearing behind you. Sometimes you pray for a bridge and the Creator gives you enough strength to swim. I know, that wasn’t what you asked for. Me neither. But apparently Heaven got jokes.
Still, we move past rocks, past fallen trees, and past people standing on our banks telling us where they think we ought to go. We move because a river that spends its whole life arguing with every stone will never reach the ocean. Some things ain’t meant to be fought; some things are meant to be flowed around. And some obstacles? Baby, give water enough time and it will carve a canyon through something that swore it could never be moved. That’s patience with muscles. That’s softness with power. That’s spirit.
Water don’t always break the rock today. Sometimes it touches it for a thousand years, again and again and again, until stone finally remembers even hardness has limits. So maybe being strong don’t always mean becoming harder. Maybe sometimes strength is remaining water in a world determined to turn you into stone flowing without losing yourself, bending without breaking, giving without emptying your soul, resting when the current grows tired, and rising when rain calls your name.
And remember, wherever life carries you, somewhere beyond what you can see there are other rivers moving too. There are people you ain’t met yet and souls praying prayers that sound suspiciously like yours. Somebody is crying beside another shoreline asking the Creator the same question you asked last night. Somebody is laughing somewhere across the world with the same kind of foolish laugh your grandmother had. Somebody is grieving while somebody else is healing. Somebody is falling in love while somebody else is beginning again. Different languages, same tears; different drums, same heartbeat; different rivers, same water.
The Caribbean opens into the Atlantic. The Mediterranean reaches outward through Gibraltar. The Red Sea finds its passage toward the Indian Ocean, while the Arabian Sea stretches into waters without fences. Oceans don’t respect the borders on our maps. Water never signed those papers. We drew the lines; water kept moving.
Maybe the Earth been trying to tell us something all along. There really ain’t five separate oceans the way our minds like to imagine ’em. There is water touching water touching water, one enormous body wearing different names depending on where we standing. And maybe humanity is like that too. Maybe we keep mistaking location for separation. You over there and me over here; your river and my river; your pain and my pain; your Creator and my Creator; your shore and my shore. But underneath all them names, currents are moving toward currents.
And one day, when we finally reach that great mysterious ocean beyond everything we understand, maybe the first thing we discover is something our souls knew before our minds got complicated: we were never separate. We were tributaries, branches of one ancient water, different routes through the same sacred landscape. Every person we loved, every stranger we passed, every ancestor whose name survived, and every one whose name disappeared into time they were water too.
So flow strange if you need to. Flow slow, flow muddy, flow crooked, flow through darkness, and flow around mountains. Rest in lakes, fall from clouds, become mist when life gets too heavy, and freeze awhile if your spirit needs stillness. But when your season changes, thaw and move again, because somewhere beyond the bend is another stream waiting to meet you. Beyond that stream is a river, beyond that river is a sea, and beyond that sea is an ocean so wide it got room for every story we ever carried.
And when you finally arrive, you may look around and realize the water beside you came from places you never knew existed: the Nile, the Amazon, the Congo, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Yangtze, the rain from your grandmother’s roof, the tears from your mother’s eyes, the sweat from your grandfather’s brow, and the water you played beside as a child. All of it traveling, all of it remembering, all of it becoming.
And perhaps the ocean will whisper what the rivers been trying to tell us since the beginning: You ain’t gotta flow like me to belong with me. You ain’t gotta come from where I came from to meet me. You ain’t gotta carry my name to carry the same spirit. We may begin as drops, travel as rivers, rest as lakes, and rage as seas, but somewhere beyond all these borders, bends, storms, names, and shorelines, we all become water
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