Water as a Spiritual Teacher
On Learning to be Strange to Yourself
Aquaphobia, a short video by June Xie
The video below was created by Jiuxing June Xie when she was a college undergraduate at Swarthmore College (2007-2011), with a BA in English Literature and minors in Educational Studies and Religion. She is a photographer, video editor, chef, and community outreach activist now living in the greater New York City area. She thinks of this video as a first, very amateur effort. I think of it as a teaching tool about the very meaning of life and the constructive role that a fear of water might play in finding that meaning but never claiming to grasp it. (Jay McDaniel)
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Aquaphobia. from june xie on Vimeo.
Additional Commentary
"Much of living in this world for me is gaining perspective, learning to let go of a current (and comfortably stable) idea of the self. I'm still having a lot of trouble with doing just that; peace, balance within the self is a constant struggle." (June Xie)
A friend told me I had to watch Aquaphobia by June Xie. I didn't want to at first, because I rarely enjoy anything I have to watch, and because I love and trust water. It's the closest thing I know to God except maybe music and dogs.
I watched it anyway, and I am so glad I watched it. I find myself grateful to water for being so strange. And grateful to June Xie, too. You can learn about her by reading an interview with her at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she went to college.
June Xie reminds us that a healthy spirituality lies in letting go of a current (and comfortably stable) idea of the self. She admits that she is still have trouble doing that. Aren't we all?
But I suspect there's a whole lot of spirituality in struggle, too. There's a beauty in imbalance that cannot be contained by balance. Peace that is too balanced becomes stagnant.
Harmony is Not Sameness, and
Sometimes It's a Little Imbalanced, Too
In Open Horizons we often use the word harmony as a synonym for peace. We speak of spirituality as desiring to be in harmony with other people, with the natural world, with heaven, and with ourselves. These are the four kinds of harmony to which Zhang Zai (1020-1077) points. He was a Chinese philosopher in the Song dynasty, and he wrote the Western Inscription, a short article with only 253 Chinese characters.
Perhaps we all know that if we are to dwell in harmony with other people and the natural world, and perhaps even with heaven, we need to appreciate and celebrate their diversity, their uniqueness, their strangeness. Heaven must be so strange, but drops of water are, too.
But in her video June Xie invites us to be strange to ourselves. If we are too comfortable inside our skin -- if we know what we think and where we stand -- we miss something deep and wonderful. We lack awareness of the many perspectives on life, and we lack awareness that we are ourselves many lives, moment by moment, each of which is a perspective. We live our lives drop by drop...one drop of experience at a time.
This is what process theology teaches us. It reminds us that our very souls are not self-same substances that endure over time, but rather a series of experiences. We are not things but moments. This moment and then this moment and then this moment.
And the truth is that no two moments are alike. Each moment is a coming together -- a concrescence -- of heaven and earth, and they are always changing. As heaven and earth change so we change. It is all so fluid.
I remember a Zen teacher being asked how the world was created and she lifted one finger. With that single act, she explained, a new world was created, a world that did not exist prior to that moment.
Indeed, says June Xie, life is a lot like water. So strange, so fluid, so scary, so different. And isn't peace strange, too? A static peace that remains fixed, devoid of change, would be suffocating.
Yes, water can be our teacher. Perhaps heaven is a perpetual invitation to let go of false stabilities which are always different, always strange, and so often immensely beautiful, precisely in their strangeness. Heaven wants us to fear water for water's sake and for our own sake, too.
Only when we delight in strangeness can we know the beautiful. Only when we are not entirely comfortable within our own skins can we know the happiness -- the peace -- that surpasses all understanding, in ways forever strange.
-- Jay McDaniel, 11/30/2021
A friend told me I had to watch Aquaphobia by June Xie. I didn't want to at first, because I rarely enjoy anything I have to watch, and because I love and trust water. It's the closest thing I know to God except maybe music and dogs.
I watched it anyway, and I am so glad I watched it. I find myself grateful to water for being so strange. And grateful to June Xie, too. You can learn about her by reading an interview with her at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she went to college.
June Xie reminds us that a healthy spirituality lies in letting go of a current (and comfortably stable) idea of the self. She admits that she is still have trouble doing that. Aren't we all?
But I suspect there's a whole lot of spirituality in struggle, too. There's a beauty in imbalance that cannot be contained by balance. Peace that is too balanced becomes stagnant.
Harmony is Not Sameness, and
Sometimes It's a Little Imbalanced, Too
In Open Horizons we often use the word harmony as a synonym for peace. We speak of spirituality as desiring to be in harmony with other people, with the natural world, with heaven, and with ourselves. These are the four kinds of harmony to which Zhang Zai (1020-1077) points. He was a Chinese philosopher in the Song dynasty, and he wrote the Western Inscription, a short article with only 253 Chinese characters.
Perhaps we all know that if we are to dwell in harmony with other people and the natural world, and perhaps even with heaven, we need to appreciate and celebrate their diversity, their uniqueness, their strangeness. Heaven must be so strange, but drops of water are, too.
But in her video June Xie invites us to be strange to ourselves. If we are too comfortable inside our skin -- if we know what we think and where we stand -- we miss something deep and wonderful. We lack awareness of the many perspectives on life, and we lack awareness that we are ourselves many lives, moment by moment, each of which is a perspective. We live our lives drop by drop...one drop of experience at a time.
This is what process theology teaches us. It reminds us that our very souls are not self-same substances that endure over time, but rather a series of experiences. We are not things but moments. This moment and then this moment and then this moment.
And the truth is that no two moments are alike. Each moment is a coming together -- a concrescence -- of heaven and earth, and they are always changing. As heaven and earth change so we change. It is all so fluid.
I remember a Zen teacher being asked how the world was created and she lifted one finger. With that single act, she explained, a new world was created, a world that did not exist prior to that moment.
Indeed, says June Xie, life is a lot like water. So strange, so fluid, so scary, so different. And isn't peace strange, too? A static peace that remains fixed, devoid of change, would be suffocating.
Yes, water can be our teacher. Perhaps heaven is a perpetual invitation to let go of false stabilities which are always different, always strange, and so often immensely beautiful, precisely in their strangeness. Heaven wants us to fear water for water's sake and for our own sake, too.
Only when we delight in strangeness can we know the beautiful. Only when we are not entirely comfortable within our own skins can we know the happiness -- the peace -- that surpasses all understanding, in ways forever strange.
-- Jay McDaniel, 11/30/2021