This morning I’m thinking about a riff on Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” One of literature’s great ironies is that even while surrounded by ocean, one can die of thirst. The irony of the name…and my name…is not lost on me. The quote is rich with symbolism and paradox. The poem itself captures Coleridge’s symbolism of the albatross, which stands for sin and redemption (think Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven). Both birds arrive uninvited, both become obsessions, both destroy the men they haunt. But the Mariner acts. He kills the albatross. His suffering flows from a choice… however inexplicable, however impulsive. Coleridge gives us an active transgressor. The punishment is a response to something done. Poe’s narrator reacts rather than act. The raven arrives at his door, answers his questions, drives him mad, but the man commits no crime. His destruction is self-inflicted through interpretation. He converts a raven that can only say one word (“Nevermore”) into an oracle of despair. The paradox of the water as metaphor is that of abundance without utility. The Mariner kills an albatross for no rational reason, and the universe exacts a terrible price. His shipmates die of thirst surrounded by seawater. The line lands as pure tragic irony: nature’s abundance made lethal by circumstance. Salt water, the source of all life on earth, evolutionarily speaking, becomes the instrument of death. The deeper point is that proximity is not access. The ocean doesn’t withhold; physics (or perhaps chemistry) does. The sailors are not victims of scarcity but of form…the wrong kind of water in the wrong configuration. That distinction matters enormously.
Water may be the most symbolically loaded substance in all of human culture , which makes sense, because it is the precondition of everything else. There’s the Primal Layer… life and death simultaneously. Water is the only natural substance that gives life and takes it with equal indifference. You cannot live without it and yet you can drown in it in minutes. This duality makes it uniquely powerful as a symbol, it refuses to be purely good or purely evil. The ocean births and the ocean swallows. The river nourishes and the river wild floods. It’s critical to stay hydrated and yet inflammation retains water and edema is anything but friendly to your health. This is why water appears at the foundation of nearly every mythology and cultural benchmark ever recorded. It predates meaning. It is meaning. Water carries remarkably consistent symbolism despite arising independently in different cultures. In Genesis, the spirit of God moves over the waters before creation begins. Water is the formless void from which order emerges. In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the primordial saltwater ocean, slain to make the world. In Hindu cosmology, Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic ocean between cycles of creation. Water is what existence looks like before it becomes anything in particular. We are the blue and plentiful planet…because of water. Then in religion, water is purification and rebirth through baptism in Christianity. The Ganges to Hindus. The Mikveh in Jewish practice. Ablution before Islamic prayer. Virtually every religious tradition uses water to wash away the old self and constitute a new one. The symbolism is consistent with immersion equaling death of the prior self and emergence and rebirth of the new. Water is also the boundary between worlds. The River Styx in Greek mythology. The waters of Lethe, also in Greek mythology, is where you drink and forget your earthly life. In countless traditions, water marks the threshold between the living and the dead, the known and the unknown. To cross water is to transform. Taoism takes this further where water is the supreme model for wu wei, effortless action. It does not force, it flows around obstacles, wears them down over time, always seeks the lowest place, and is ultimately irresistible. Water may be the closest natural analogy to the Tao itself.
But back to Coleridge…with all this in mind, the ocean in The Ancient Mariner becomes extraordinarily rich. It is simultaneously the unconscious that the Mariner cannot escape, the chaos preceding redemption, the boundary world where normal rules don’t apply, the indifferent universe that punishes and pardons with equal arbitrariness, and, eventually, the medium through which grace finally arrives through the rain.
We are now living in the age where water’s symbolism is becoming literal geopolitics. Freshwater scarcity (made scarcer by AI data center demands), aquifer depletion (over-taxing the soil for agribusiness and golf courses), glacial retreat (dare I say it…Global Climate Change), are all upon us. The ancient metaphor is materializing as strategic reality. Nations will fight over water in the 21st century the way they fought over oil in the 20th. How ironic that we are at that transition when we are fighting over the flow of oil through a strategic stretch of water at this very moment. Water is everywhere and increasingly unavailable. The Coleridge poem has become prophecy.
And I cannot escape it even if I stop watching MS NOW. It surrounds me on my hilltop. My neighbor Melisa says that its dry in the desert, but it always rains on my little hilltop in the desert. That’s what 25 zones of irrigation and a predilection for the verdant will get you. Mike & Melisa take pride in being spare with water, I worry about overwatering. I am constantly tweaking my watering times and cycles, especially as I add pots with colorful plants that are less indigenous, but prosper in this climate anyway…with adequate water. I am not a green lawn guy and find that absurd in this environment, but I inherited a verdant set of gardens and I want to both keep and enhance them. My monthly water bill is only somewhat higher than others in the hood and they are good about informing me of possible leaks based on high usage. Once again, I just got such a notice and once again I called for an hourly usage report, which they always dutifully send me on request. The leak culprit does not seem to be irrigation, but suspiciously in synch with the timing of my spa filter pump circulation schedule. My spa maintenance guy continues to be a nice old guy who’s wife keeps him in harness to keep the household income flowing…but what he doesn’t know about system leaks could fill a very large cistern. So I call in the pro from Valley Center who comes over and plays with the system while he and I intellectualize about the fluid dynamics of it all. Bingo! Leak arrested (its always the overflow valve). Good to solve that before the hot weather. It should be good for another two years when the mystery will begin all over again.
San Diego’s water story is actually fascinating, and carries its own echoes of the paradox we’ve been discussing. The core irony is that San Diego sits on the Pacific Ocean and receives about 10 inches of rain per year and yet it is one of the most water-stressed major cities in America. As a heavily populated region with high freshwater demands and limited local supply, San Diego imports roughly 80% of its freshwater from other regions, primarily the Colorado River and the Sierra Nevada via Northern California. The ocean is everywhere. Usable water is scarce. But the county has done a great job of getting out ahead of the issue. Over the last three decades the Water Authority invested roughly $3 billion in regional water reliability projects. Those investments include the nation’s largest seawater desalination plant in Carlsbad, which provides a drought-proof source of water. The Pure Water San Diego program, the biggest infrastructure project in the City’s history, which will provide nearly half of San Diego’s water supply locally by the end of 2035 — purifying wastewater back to drinking water standard. Pure Water San Diego is essentially stripping the water of its past identity through advanced purification, and reintroducing it as clean drinking water. The water forgets what it was. It is reborn. And the Carlsbad desalination plant is the literal answer to Coleridge, taking the undrinkable ocean and making it potable. The Ancient Mariner’s curse, solved by reverse osmosis. And then there’s me, standing there with hose in hand on my hilltop…overwatering everything in sight while my spa (my personal albitross) does its worst.