The Water That Remembers

Come closer. I have to speak quietly now. Water doesn't like noise.

I already told you how my eyes of water were born, when the sky fell. Now I want to tell you what they really are.

My cenotes remember.

You heard right. That water down there in the dark is the same water it's been for millions of years. It never left. It watched the animals as big as houses go by, it watched the first leaf grow, it heard the first bird sing. It was already here waiting when there was nobody yet to wait for. And everything it has seen, it kept. Drop after drop. Water doesn't forget anything.

Want to know a secret? The trees know it too. That's why the roots of the biggest ones go down, and down, and down in the dark until they touch it. They don't go down only to drink. They go down to listen. They put one foot in the old water, they feel everything it remembers, and then they carry it up to the leaves. That's why my trees are so wise. Their feet are in the memory of the world.

The old people knew this. When they wanted to talk to someone who was gone, they came here, leaned over the water and spoke softly. The people you love don't disappear, they said. They go down into the water, and the water keeps them.

I don't know if that's true. I'm old, but I don't know everything, and anyone who tells you they know everything is lying to you. But I know this: when a child leans over a cenote and sees his face trembling in the dark water, for a moment he isn't only looking at himself. He's looking into something older than him, older than his father, older than his father's father.

And then something small and enormous happens at the same time: the child goes quiet. Even the chattiest one. He stops talking and he looks. Because something inside him just recognized something.

That's the only prayer the water asks for. Not words. Just the silence of someone who understands they're standing in front of something big.

Then the grandmother goes quiet, and from a corner where nobody was looking a very small voice asks if she can speak too. It's the spider.

I know. You made that face. Everybody makes that face when I show up. When the hummingbird arrives you clap. When I arrive, a shudder. I'm not offended. I've been used to it for millions of years.

But look at my web. I made it tonight, by myself, in the dark, while you were asleep. Nobody taught me how, and there isn't one wrong knot in it. Then the wind tears it, and I start over. The next night, from the beginning, without complaining.

I'm telling you this because I know there's a child among you who sometimes feels the way you see me. The one they call clumsy. The one who thinks she isn't as pretty as the others. The one who stays off to the side.

And to him I want to say one thing, spider to spider: it doesn't matter at all how you look from the outside. What matters is what you can do when nobody's watching. I look frightening from the outside. But at night, alone, I build something not even the hummingbird knows how to make. And when the light comes, it shines.

You have a web too, somewhere inside you. Maybe you don't know yet what it is. But it's there. A spider is telling you, and spiders know about these things.