A Watery World

By the King Under the Sea

The King Under the Sea looks a bit like a Kelpie. He is an elemental and like the other water elementals works for the planet, but only in the watery part of the world. They help us out enormously by cleaning and dispersing the toxins we pour into the oceans. Imagine if someone routinely parked a space ship over our heads and flushed their toilets out onto the planet. Someone would end up doing the cleaning.

The King orchestrates the other elementals, and directs resources so they are best  used. On dry ground we may call him the boss, but under the water he is the being best suited for organising the others. He is not considered higher in rank than anyone else. Again, think of a colour wheel – one colour does not outrank another; they are just different.

Greetings! I do not usually have much to do with you who live on dry land, but many of you have noticed that your land is not so dry right now. In the UK it is running with rainwater, in the US it is piled high with frozen water. All is part of my realm; my fingerprints are in every drop of water. Where there is drought, as in the Napa Valley of California, the balance of water has shifted. It is a fluid, ever-moving element.

Dry land has been very static of recent years, and it is as if you think nothing will ever change the boundaries between the land and sea. There is more than a trace of the laws of property about this: humans feel they own parcels of land up to the beaches and that is the end of the story.

5,000 years ago the land of Dogger between the Netherlands and eastern England was a hunting ground. There are maritime archaeological digs in the villages drowned under the Channel. Bodiam and Harlech Castles were on the coastlines, but are now miles inland. The water of the world is not static, and not under your control. The best way to meet it is to be as flexible as it is. Water can’t be pinned to one level.

I see a world where the boundaries between land and sea return to being much less fixed in place, where what has become rigid releases its hold and begins to move. Maybe one year it will be dry land, and another under water. In the UK you had marshy valleys that are presently drained, particularly in Scotland. It was easier to row across the middle than travel around the ends of the lochs. Coastlines move and move with the wave action. You cannot hold back the sea or the rain, it is part of the Earth and beyond your control. We feel we have been shut out of parts of the Earth where we once lived, and we are ready to rediscover these areas. Every bit of the Earth is different from the piece next to it, and we’ve missed living with some of the dry areas.

©Candace Caddick

#Dawlish #KingUndertheSea #rain #snow