Water - A (quick) Pause inLent

The theme of readings for the 3rd week in Lent is water, which seems quite timely as I have been

noting World Water Day last Wednesday.
We are heading for a serious water crisis, not because there isn't going to be enough water, but because it's going to be
in the wrong places
polluted
salty
in short supply where we need it

We are draining the ground water very fast (60% of European cities are using up groundwater resources faster than they can be replenished - I got this figure off the New Civil Engineer, so you can bet that if they are worried, we should be).

We are creating deserts where fertile ground used to be by cutting down trees

We are creating serious floods by paving over ground which used to store water and release it into rivers gradually, or by building on flood plains

and of course,

We are melting the ice caps by excessive carbon emissions. It was also Climate Change week last week, and Earth Hour on Saturday.

Learning about the rock formations in my territory

and finding that a lot of my home landscape was created by water - the action of glaciers carving out valleys and depositing sedimentary rocks, and the inundation of the sea, which at one time used to come in as far as Aberfoyle.

Watching Richard Ashrowan's beautiful film 'Lament'

which features eddies in the River Tweed, at a geo-poetics Weekend at Brantwood House in the Lake District. This lead us to reflect on the transitory nature of human lives---

and
remembering as a counter-balance the passage in Psalm 1
where the man who ponders the law of the Lord is compared to
a tree that is planted
beside the flowing waters
that yields its fruit in due season
and whose leaves shall never fail