The Liminal Compass: A Droplet Dance

Water runs all through the rainforest, even through its name; clinging to the solid form of forest, seeping water into its very identity. It hangs as a ghostly body, suspended, in the thick mists that cling to the tree tops in grey-blue dawn hours. It is amorphous, airborne, carried as humidity. Condensed and powerful as it carves its river path through the valleys.

In the soft layer of sky that shares its border with the canopy the ghostly apparition of an ocean floats; an ethereal memory of droplets lifted from the sea and borne inland, shifting in the currents of air like the tide coming in. A cloud of countless watery individual drops, each with their own past, path and story to tell.

Follow a single one of those droplets, drawn silently down to meet the corporeal world. Like the track of a shooting star it noiselessly leaves the body of cloud, becomes visible, calls itself rainfall and plummets through the air. A shape-shifting soloist on its way to find the leaf, bark, beak and stone dance partners that will carry it onwards.

At its moment of impact the droplet stretches itself outwards to form a crown, coronating its meeting with the valley landscape of a single leaf. Sheparded by gravity and the impermeable leafy terrain (those co-conspirators of water manipulation), it pulls its regal crown back into itself, trickling in rivulets down leaf vein tributaries, along a spine canal, drips down through the branches to present itself as dewdrop chandelier. It catches the light, glows in its pregnancy, growing larger and fuller, heavier, more reflective... If you were to lean close, it would offer you up a mirror; your own image wrought on the delicate surface of its skin.

Then, a moment of rebirth. Snatched by the passing flight of a bird, our drop becomes a jewel, held in a setting of feathers as it is carried downwards to the low gloaming of the forest floor. A moment of stillness as its host alights; a second in which the droplet becomes a chameleon, channeling kingfisher blues and royal purples and petrol hues of a feathery breast before a shake that sets off a firework display of water. The droplet joins its cousins in the air once more. Dances towards a new partner.

This one; a long spring-green frond; delicate, young, complex at its periphery. The droplet joins hands with its water brethren and forms a chain that leads a dance along the green edge, bending its plant partner back into a low, sweeping arabesque. Who knows where one droplet ends and another begins now? Water’s lineage is not linear. This dance atop the back of the young frond is an act of reincarnation; a multicultural gene pool of molecules and past particle lives blurring the story of single origin.

So we can’t say whether it is our droplet or its mother, father, children, brother, sister, cousin (all one and the same and inseparable) that transforms once again and takes the form of a globe, braced here between the dark spines of a caterpillar’s back. This slow-moving creature; its pre-chrysalis territory measures metres not miles. It carries the droplet high like a relic, borne aloft on the bier of its own body. The globe maps out atoms that have travelled continents; carries traces of places and beings that are as another galaxy to the caterpillar pilgrim.

But no matter how carefully carried, all relics turn to dust eventually. So too, the droplet. Brushed by stone on its pilgrims path the globe shatters, dissipates, spreading itself across the surface of rock which gifts it offerings of minerals and microscopic morsels of plant particles as it passes.

Water has made this journey before and so as our droplet follows gravity’s tug down the hillside it follows the well worn path its kind has carved through the surface of the stone. Along miniature canals, into teacup reservoirs, spilling over into pygmy waterfalls. It travels spider-like along the underside of an overhang, weaves in and out of tendrils that try to stop the little jewel from slipping through their fingers.

It is here that I meet our droplet. It leaps from its precipice to meet the skin of my wrist; the cool water meeting thin skin like a kiss meant for the blood flow running just beneath the surface. It lingers with me only a little while. Just long enough to travel the short distance from wrist to finger tip, following to where I point the way, to where it meets the ground once more. It scatters into the imperceptible catacombs that permeate the mud and root I grasp on my way up the trail. So we head in opposite directions; me upwards, the water droplet downwards. But in the brief moment before we part ways, before the scattering an exchange is made. A gift of moisture left in the porous surface of me. A trace element of me carried onwards on the droplet journey.

Is some part of me now woven into the watery family tree, like the leaf, bird, frond and stone before me? Am I in some microscopic way carried into the landscape it travels through trading dances for dust? And what of the traces it left me? Does a part of me carry the memory of this landscape, its plants and creatures?

The droplet carries on its way, handed from one partner to another in a dance all the way to the foot of the mountain, to the river, to the coastline, to the ocean. Every step of the dance an intimate moment, shaping and shaped by the elements encountered along the way.

Out in the watery universe of the ocean untold numbers of journeys converge. A constellation of droplets that have known the land, the people, the plants and the animals. Traces carried and married before ascending to the heavens to become ghostly again. We’re all of us inhaled by the lungs of the world. All interconnected. All there in one breath.