Spirituality and Welln
Lloyd Den Boer
Being Thirsty
I remember how it felt. The mid-afternoon sun would
be blazing, the humidity high. Then in my mid-teens,
I would be on a hay wagon behind a baler. My job was
to hook bales free of the baler’s chute, lug them to
the back of the wagon, and stack them securely, five
or six rows high. The baler’s pace demanded my full
attention. The pounding of the baler and the growling
of the tractor sealed off distractions. The heat beat
down. Suddenly, motion, sound, swirling dust —
everything would stop. The mid-afternoon snack had
arrived and with it a jug of fresh well water. Just as
suddenly, I would realize that I was thirsty, desperately
thirsty. Raising the jug high, I would drink on and on,
feeling the chill of the water rise in my belly. Water
was never as good. I would never have enough.
Thirst is a doorway to understanding who we are
and how we relate to our planet. More than half of
our body weight is water. Water is a primary building
block of our cells. We need it to swallow and digest our
food, lubricate our joints, flush wastes and toxins from
our bodies, carry oxygen and nutrients to our cells,
and more. When as little as two per cent of our body’s
water has been lost, we get thirsty. Humans depend
on water; we know that from direct experience. Along
with every other living being on this planet, we are
creatures who need what Earth provides.
Not only do we need the water that Earth provides,
our societies and cultures need the ways that Earth
provides it. Water falls from the sky as rain or snow,
percolates down through the soil, and runs away in
growing streams and rivers until it pools in great
basins, some of them as large as oceans, some of them
far beneath the ground. Marvellously, the water that
falls will also rise, returning to the sky, only to fall
again another day. Without that cycle, the earth would
be barren. We depend on it, too. Agriculture requires
predictable rains. Without waterways, trade would
not have developed as it did. Ways of life that we have