Healing Water and Healing Love:
The Same System Change
“Water is to nature what love is to the human being. Through healing water, we cure nature – through healing love, we cure humankind. The healing of water and the healing of love equally demand that existing societal systems be turned upside down. In both areas we observe that the same basic laws of life are in contradiction with the basic laws of capitalism. The new era will develop to the degree that the basic laws of life are discovered, perceived and followed by humanity.”
–Dieter Duhm
Our ecological experts tell us that we can’t resolve the alarming problems of desertification and erosion by damming up rivers, constructing concrete canals and practicing monoculture farming. Instead, desertified landscapes heal when we allow the rainwater to filter into the Earth body again. Thereby, a natural topsoil layer develops and biotopes begin to flourish in healthy diversity. It’s through diversity that natural systems achieve stability and resilience. Nature always works toward this kind of healing process – yet given the levels of destruction in most parts of the world, we humans have the responsibility to actively support and so accelerate it. In fact, nature has enormous self-healing powers and immediately regenerates itself when we create the ecological structures it needs for healing (see Water Retention Landscapes).
Love and sexuality work in a surprisingly similar way.
In the dominant society, love causes the same damage that rainwater causes in nature when it isn’t received by a natural topsoil layer. Both water and love turn violent – there are floods when it rains and there are droughts and wildfires when it doesn’t. Likewise, people often become obsessed, jealous and violent when touched by sexual high voltage or otherwise face loneliness. Intending to control those powers, we’ve imprisoned our love relationships in the narrow cages of restrictive and possessive relationships, just as we’ve imprisoned water in plastic-lined ponds, and straightened its flow with tight canals.
Love wants to move freely, like water. It wants to meander and to oscillate, but also to root deeply in stable relationships, just as water naturally sinks deep into the earth. How can nature become a teacher for our social questions and how can a system of life arise in which love becomes sustainable? What does it need to look like to heal the fear of loss in love?
Love and Eros need different social structures, just as water needs different ecological structures, to heal and thrive. When there is a natural layer of topsoil, rainwater is a true blessing, as it gives life to plants, animals and humans. In the same way, Eros is a true gift of vitality to all beings, a sacred life force allowing us to experience our innate unity with all beings, when it’s received and held by a community of trust. Trust among humans is like topsoil in nature. To re-build it, couples, families and single people alike need a community in which they can embed themselves – a community that, in turn, is embedded in a wider societal system. We need communities that no longer suppress, but say “yes” to Eros, and honor it (see Healing of Love).
When we become quiet enough, we can feel life pulsing through us, wanting to offer us its answers. Love works according to its own inherent logic, and we can study this logic. Love and Eros want to be free – so do we and all sentient beings. We all want to move according to our true nature.
Once we have recognized this, we will establish ways of living in which we can express our truth in love rather than wage war in our relationships, so that trust can grow, instead of subliminal separation anxiety. These ways of living exist in communities based on transparency and trust that are able to embrace truth in love and Eros. This allows peace to arise even when one partner gives his or her attention to another. Instead of following the habits of jealousy and drama, we can come to the insight that, in love too, stability and permanence arise from diversity and freedom.
Just as a devastated landscape can heal through the creation of water retention spaces, the devastated state of sexuality and relationships in our world can turn into living love, that emerges from the basis of trust, in a new social system.
The same principles apply to both water and love – they remain pure, vital and fresh forever when they can move according to their true nature.
Bernd Mueller, head of our Global Ecology Institute, speaks about the consciousness of water: