Water Wizardry was filmed at Filigreen Farm in Mendocino County, California, where water is approached as a living substance and vital force. The film follows the farm’s work with flowforms and vortex spinners—technologies that mimic the natural movements of rivers and springs to restore water’s vitality. Inspired by the pioneering research of sculptor John Wilkes, Filigreen’s practice brings water into balance and harmony with its Biodynamic farming.
“It is the story of the falling rain to turn into a leaf and fall again it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower it is the secret of a summer shower to steal the light and hide it in a flower.”
Here, in a nutshell, the poet, Alice Oswald, has written my entire thesis.
What follows are a few footnotes…
Biodynamic practitioners have been potentizing water, stirring preparations, for one hundred years. We are not new to the idea of structured water. But what is new is the ability, from current work in biophysics, to explain how “informed” water can be built, and even propagated.My friend, an agronomist, is highly skeptical as I stir horn silica, a practiced alchemy. He knows that silica, a crystal, is immune to all physical interventions. And yet, as I stir for an hour, methodically building water memory, he gives me a second look.
Nature, the premier scientific journal, destroyed the life and work of renowned French scientist Jacque Benvenist, when he dared to publish a paper on the properties of water in high dilution and water memory. A lid was subsequently placed on water science; going forward, the work was automatically pigeonholed as pseudoscience. The fact that this work has endured, somewhat under the radar, means that water can continue to dissolve the sandcastle of materialism that has held science hostage since The Enlightenment.
Benvenist’s work has been vindicated, carried on by his colleagues using rigorous peer review to challenge these old norms with the quantum potentialities of this freshly apprehended, simplest and most common of molecules: water.
Reductionist science has characterized water as a neutral dipole of H2O: comatose and a dead substance from a pipe or bottle. We can study her, thus, as a simple molecule, stagnant in the lab, or experience her as every child does- flowing as the magic of magics out in nature, the wilder the better. Outside the lab in the real world, she is a different being. This consummate shapeshifter, queen of reincarnation, continues to fool us all.
Why should water be limited to three phases of matter?
The introduction of the fourth phase of water beyond ice, liquid, and vapor was one of synchronicity. Gerald Pollock coined the name EZ Water, Mae Wan Ho called what she discovered Liquid Crystalline Water, Emilio del Giudice identified Coherent Domain Water. Initially, their work was independent; three different directions, three different labs, three different countries, discovering a similar groundbreaking concept at about the same time.
From analyzing an individual honeybee, it is impossible to know anything about the spirit of the hive, or the hive, itself. From an individual water molecule, it is equally impossible to know what living water is. Bees cluster-up and hang upside-down in the warm dark to make their hexagonal body: the comb. Likewise, living water molecules, unlike bulk water (chaotic and of random motion), cluster-up and make a flexible hexagonal matrix structure known as liquid crystalline. The one is full of honey, the other is full of light.
Mae Wan Ho put it this way: “Every part is in communion with every other part through a dynamic, tunable, responsive, living crystal medium. It is within this crystal matrix that water creates coherent domains that are sensing, storing, amplifying, transducing and transmitting energy, vibration and light.”
Mainstream science chooses to see none of this. It tiptoes around water in her lump-of-coal state. And yet, we still go to water to consecrate moments and places and loved ones. We pray over water. Why? Because we trust our intuition, gather water from the spring, and know that there is a connection between her and our very life force.
Gerald Pollock was the first to discover that structured water was made of hexagonal sheets of negative charge. In making this hexagonal crystal, positive protons and all other solutes are excluded, hence the name “exclusion zone” or EZ Water. The charge separation creates a battery in which this polarity becomes nature’s engine. Pollack has even used pure structured water to turn on a small LED lightbulb. What could be the source of energy for such a water battery?
Light!
Water becomes a ferry boat for light, whereby attraction and repulsion of polarized forces create pulsation and the dance of creation from the mitochondria, all the way up to a thunderstorm, and down, again. Water catches light, holds light, flashes with lightning and resonates with the voice of the thunder. Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, cycling and purifying, mineralizing, restructuring…all with this hidden light, within. What part of her body is not sacred?
Full spectrum living water is more than just one element out of the four. Water dissolves the “mother substance” (Earth), by the laminar and turbulent flow of her contact with Air which, in turn, builds the charge separation that sparks as Fire. She encompasses all.
From Viktor Schamberger’s aphorism “Comprehend, then copy nature” we attempt to understand the waterfall. The greatest expression of incarnating water on the American continent is Yosemite Falls. Fresh out of snow and ice in May from the High Sierra, water becomes her clear glassy self for only a moment, to then shoot over the last granite ledge and fall 2400 feet, below. Instantly this gravity-bound substance grows white wings as it meets air, its foam seething in vast streamers and comets. Each spinning droplet becomes a shooting star of charged particles, coherent and alive in misty rainbow hue. This water, given over to enormous gravity, becomes her opposite at the rocky bottom, where a huge visible cloud of levitating negative ions floats upward. Incredibly, Emilio del Giudice has described, in his “Evidence of Coherent Dynamics in Water Droplets of Waterfalls”, the discovery of water coherent domains, after all of the turbulence of the waterfall, surviving even a great distance downstream from the Falls.
Vortexed water goes through similar processes as a waterfall, as we mix biodynamic preparations 500 and 501. A multi-layered surface area of spinning water in laminar planes is opened up to the central air core of the vortex. The fantastic architecture of this air column is quickly broken into charged particles of nano bubbles as we go from laminar flow to turbulent flow and back, again, with each change of direction. This waterfall-like creation of coherent domains expresses, in the words of Enzo Nastati, ……“the etheric realm at the frequency that is conferred upon it by the preparation... It is as if an enormous sheet is gathered up like the dew of the night and collapses at the breaking of the vortex”.
Flow Making Form
One of the greatest insights from keen observation into the nature of water was recorded 500 years ago. Leonardo da Vinci came to water with a voracious mind and the ability to transcribe his concepts, on the fly, with incredibly accurate drawings. He was searching for the source, the formative force, of nature, and it was water that gave the greatest clues.
In medieval cosmology, each human being was a cosmos, unto herself. Four hundred years later, Rudolph Steiner mirrored this view: to understand the outer world, look within the human form, and vice versa. Without the benefit of X-ray vision, Leonardo, the father of fluid dynamics, discovered the double-alternating vortex emanating from the left ventricle of the heart.
This was the first clear example, in the western world, of flow making form. And the form was always water (or, in this case, blood) curling into herself to complete the circle. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man stands within the square and the circle, simultaneously: the circle-the cosmos and the divine; the square-the earthly and the mundane.
“Turbolenza”, in all of its manifestations, dominated Leonardo’s thought, from painting the curls of an angel‘s hair, to a train of vortices shedding from a stick placed in the river. Water, curling in on herself into an eddy or a vortex to close the circle and become connected to the spin of the universe from a silent, inward flow.
His drawings were so accurate that, in today’s world, it takes the sophisticated technology of an MRI machine, in vivo, to see clearly what he saw and drew from a glass model, five centuries ago. They depict the first flowing form, or flow form, giving us a glimpse into this great formative force.
It was not until the work in Projective Geometry of George Adams and Lawrence Edwards, together with the sculptor, John Wilkes, that the first motif of the flowform emerged, by creating a sculpted basin of path curves that mimic alternate, counter-rotating vortices. These fundamental patterns, when hewn or molded by hand from a solid substance such as stone, plaster or concrete, give rise to the physical object known as a “flow form”, which in turn gives water the opening to form the dynamic and potentizing phenomena that bear the same name. The configuration of eggs, tree buds breaking, the vortex pattern within a pinecone..these were the gestures that were mimicked in the first flowforms. From Leonardo, we witness flow making form. From Wilkes, and company, we witness form making flow.
John Wilkes' experiments in flowing form also studied the outer phenomena in nature of the Von Karman “vortex street” or “avenue”. This is the discovery of the immense architecture, akin to Leonardo’s stick in the river, of a train of counterrotating, alternating vortices in rhythmic flow. Wilkes’ genius was to bring the alternating vortices together to play off one another, within the same basin, bringing the sinuosity of rivers into close quarters, the full figure eight from one path curve to the other in a dynamic, rocking rhythm. Water gets to play, laminar flow into turbulent flow into laminar flow, leading, like the heart, eventually, into a full pulse.
And what is the enlivening effect of flowforms on water?
Flowforms can triple and hold for an extended period the dissolved oxygen content of stagnant water, increase the alkalinity and pH level, stimulate its microbiological life, but, most importantly, through this rhythmical lemniscate, create harmonic flow. Water molecules, spinning to infinity on one side, and then in the reverse, begin to hum with their own charge and levity. At this point, subtle electromagnetic energy in packages of coherent domains hold onto the memory of the specific preparation being potentized.
Besides the mixing of preparations, the most important use of the flow form is to demonstrate the more inward side of water in all of her flow-making forms. Flowforms and all manner of vortices can deliver structured, living water that fosters color, scent, flavor and the true qualities of nutritional substance, uplifting the sense of fertility in the very atmosphere of a place or garden.
As farmers and gardeners, we can stand in the circle or the square or, like Leonardo, both simultaneously, working with but looking beyond the limitation of the biochemical structure of organisms. “The structure of water is more important than its chemical composition” (Rostrum Roy, Professor of Chemistry, Penn State University). It is water’s ability to close the circle and travel inward to change her structure into the fourth phase that is key.
My friend, the agronomist, is still not convinced. To better speak his language, I turn to Professor Pollack’s comparison of structured water with computer memory. A silicon thumb drive consists of a two-dimensional array of transistors, each transistor with two states, 0 and 1. It is the distribution of these 0’s and 1’s that gives rise to the thumb drive’s memory. Each hexagonal sheet of structured water is a regular array of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen, comparatively, has up to five oxidation states (-2,-1, 0,+1,+2), not just in two dimensions, but extending into three dimensions, because they stack. The potential of EZ water over silicone has, therefore, the theoretical advantage of one billion times more memory than a thumb drive in a single drop of water on the head of a pin! What does this say about a dawn meadow covered in a trillion drops of dew?
When it comes to the “sensitive chaos” of water, however, the poet gets the last word:
“…and this tale hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail if only I a passerby could pass as clear as water through a plume of grass to find the sunlight hidden at the tip turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip…”
