“Is the expression really: it's raining cats and dogs?”, a Dutch friend of mine asked me recently. “Yep,” I said. “And you better be careful not to step in a poodle.” And would you believe it? She actually giggled. Who would have thought paying attention to the cracker jokes at Christmas would pay off?

But this little chat got me curious. Where in the world did the expression come from? Well, England, of course. But it turns out it comes from the Greek expression ‘cata doxa’, which means contrary to experience or belief. So, English people instead of saying “It’s raining cata doxa” when it was raining unbelievably hard, soon turned this into the far more incredible statement that it was, in fact, raining cats and dogs.

To be honest, this doesn't surprise me. English people have always liked putting their own little twist on foreign words. Indeed, this is why a certain local supermarket is often affectionately referred to as ‘Apples and Onions’.

It's so nice to have had some rain though. We need it. It can’t be sunny all the time, and it always amazes me to watch the ground after we’ve had a few showers to see how quickly nature starts to grow its bushy green beard again. It just shows you - water truly is life.

Water is life

I read somewhere that the water in you was a thunderstorm a week ago, and that it will be in the ocean again soon enough. Apparently, there’s been the same amount of water in the world since the earth was formed, and it's been continuously siphoning through rocks, air, animals, and plants since… well, forever. Here's a thought, at some point the water inside you would have been inside a dinosaur! And since this is the case, and you are mostly water, it begs the question: What are you really? Maybe we were all just invented by water as a way of moving itself around?

It's like Bruce Lee said, “When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot” (add your favourite herbs and/or spices and it becomes tea as well). If you then drink the tea, maybe the water becomes you? And maybe, just maybe, it used to be Bruce Lee as well. Think about that the next time you have the inexplicable urge to do a karate chop or a high kick - the water still has some fire left in it.

Go with the flow

I’m guilty of deifying the natural world. Like the Ancient Greeks, I like to think of the sun and the moon in particular as somehow ethereal beings reigning down from above, and I’m afraid I’m finding myself doing it again now with water (as it is also now raining down from above). But it's hard not to conclude that something that flows so freely between everything and everyone, that all life depends on, and that in a sense connects us all, isn't somehow the definition of an all-knowing and all-encompassing God.

And if it isn’t the divine spark of life, at the very least it’s the lubricant. It keeps everything everywhere flowing to where it needs to be. From the nutrients and oxygen to your cells, to the rivers out into the sea and then back up into the sky - truly the height of responsibility. And yet, water seems to do it all effortlessly. It never tries too hard. Water always follows the path of least resistance. It's the original Yogi teaching us all, quite literally, how to ‘go with the flow’.

With its godly trait to be formless, water transforms itself all the time. When it freezes and becomes solid it has the curious little quirk of becoming less dense and so can float on, well… itself. This celestial ability to shape-shift means it can be solid enough to sink the Titanic, but also when confronted about it (and things get heated) it can simply float away in a puff of steam.

This peculiarity of ice to keep to the surface was admittedly unfortunate for the Titanic, however, water, generally speaking, breaks the rules of chemistry for our convenience. Lakes freeze on the top, which allows all the creatures below to carry on as usual and grants us our very own taste of divinity as we walk (or skate) on the water above.

So, as I sit here watching the water droplets run down my window, I feel quite at peace that I can’t play in the sun today. For one thing, it allows me to get some writing done. But I also feel grateful that water is bringing life back to the Algarve, giving the ground a much-needed drink, and encouraging hidden little seeds to be brave enough to push through to the surface and paint the world green again.

I also feel a kind of unity with it, and I'm pleased to think that maybe my ramblings are, in a sense, water contemplating itself. I don't mean to be too deep - but I think that it's finding itself particularly hard to fathom.