Reflections on Water ! Happy Earth Day !

An oil painting of Venice, I painted a few years back and titled it Reflections on water. A ‘floating city’ with its meandering waterways and the gondolas, Venice has captivated my imagination since I was a child. I first learnt about Venice, about a city built on water, in my geography class. Venice and its waterways were also described by my English teacher, when she introduced Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice. 

I imagined the children living in houses like the street in this painting stepping out of the door and dipping their feet in the canals, wondered if water seeped in the homes and buildings, how they got around, and more importantly how did they build all these structures in water. It was just a wild ride of thoughts in a child’s imagination. It was much later, that I read about the architectural marvel on how an entire city was built on water, with its grand palaces, cathedrals and piazzas and a maze of canals and bridges, that has stood the test of time for last 1400 years and counting.

While I was contemplating on this painting and reflecting on Venetian art, it also led me to think about – water – the life giving resource that makes our home, planet earth unique and habitable, a precious commodity without which life on this planet cannot survive. About 60% of human body is composed of water. Water regulates body temperature, maintains our muscles, lubricates joints, prevents constipation, flushes out waste products, carries nutrients to our cells, and protects our organs and tissues. We cannot function without water. Reflections on water as seen in this painting is a metaphor on my reflections on the critical role water plays in our survival and existence for life on Earth.

In cities like Venice, humans have found an ingenious way to use water not only for survival but as a protection, a barrier to shield from invaders from the North.

Founded as a refuge within the marshy islands of the Venetian lagoon, an enclosed bay in the Adriatic sea to be safe from invading Barbarians, after the fall of the Roman empire, Venice is a testament to human ingenuity to engineer a city on and surrounded by water, a feat which took multiple generations, spanning 400 years.  Building a settlement on soft marshy land in the lagoon was tricky, to enable load baring capability, several thousand timber/wooden were driven deep into the bottom of the lagoon, and each placed very close, providing a tapestry of wooden pillars that formed the base surface in which the cities structures were then built.

From common experience, question that comes to mind is – how has the wood has not rotted away and still serving as a load bearing platform for more than 1400 years. Answer to this is two fold: Lack of oxygen in water logged wooden piles make it harder for fungi and bacteria to invade and decompose the wood. Second, the lagoon’s mineral rich water, has helped in preserving the wood, the salt water, mud and minerals in the marshes that has been seeping into the wood’s porous interior, has filled the pores, thus transforming wood into a more compact rigid structure.

On this earth day, my reflections go back to water, the precious, life giving and sustaining resource, the preservation of which deserves our collective human ingenuity as we’ve done as a species with marvels like building a floating city, exploring space, advances in medicine and feats in several other domains.

In the words of Carl Sagan, “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”