By: Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
I have always felt awe around water, not the kind that announces itself loudly, but the kind that settles into you quietly, like recognition. Water has never felt neutral to me. It feels ancient. Intentional. As if it remembers something I do not fully know how to name.
Long before there were oceans, water was already on its way. In the early universe, hydrogen and oxygen formed in the aftermath of stellar death and were carried forward through cosmic time. Ice accumulated in the cold regions of forming solar systems. Comets, frozen archives of deep time, collided with a young Earth, delivering vast quantities of water. What looks, from one angle, like chaos and impact is, from another, coherence emerging across scales. Quantum fluctuations stabilized into matter. Matter is organized into structure. Probability collapsed into a pattern. Over billions of years, chance began to resemble meaning.
The oceans were not simply filled. They were written into existence.
Earth became roughly seventy percent water. So did we. This is not a metaphor. It is continuity. Evolution does not abandon its origins; it elaborates them. Life most likely began deep underwater near hydrothermal vents, where energy gradients, mineral surfaces, and liquid water created conditions that enabled chemistry to cross a threshold into biology. No intention. No plan. And yet emergence. From particles to molecules, from molecules to cells, from cells to consciousness, water was the medium that allowed complexity to stabilize and endure.
Water is how matter learned to remember itself.
But evolution does not promise safety. It promises persistence, not protection. Water gives life, and it takes it, without malice and without apology.
That truth is not abstract to me. I immigrated to this country during the latter stages of the Cuban Rafter Crisis.
I could have died at sea on July 15, 1994. The ocean could have taken me, but I reached these shores on July 17. During the Cuban Rafter Crisis of the early 1990s, thousands fled on improvised vessels, entrusting the open sea with everything they had. Research cited by the Cuban American National Council’s Policy Center suggests that only one in four survived the crossing. Statistically speaking, there are three timelines in which I did not make it. Three versions of this story that end underwater.
I sometimes think about it in quantum terms, as a meditation on humility and chance. Reality does not guarantee outcomes. It only offers probabilities. The self I inhabit is one outcome among many that could have occurred. Survival is not proof of deserving. It is evidence of contingency.
Water taught me that early.
And yet, humans were never meant to live underwater. Evolution shaped us to breathe air, to walk upright, to build vessels rather than gills. Our relationship with water has always been paradoxical. We rise above it through shipbuilding. We move beneath it through technology. We live alongside it through adaptation. We do not conquer water. We negotiate with it.
The same is true of our inner lives.
Each of us carries an interior ocean, depths shaped by memory, fear, longing, and hope. There are trenches within us deeper than anything mapped by sonar. And lately, it feels as though many of us are underwater. Stress. Anxiety. A constant saturation of violence and misinformation. Rumors of war close to home. Innocent people were killed by traumatized individuals who were offered weapons instead of care. Truth flattened into spectacle. Cruelty justified through screens that never stop glowing.
Another name. Another life erased. Another explanation that insults both intelligence and grief.
I need to be honest. I feel like I am drowning.
It feels like swimming upward again and again, only to be pulled back down by the next wave. Another headline. Another video. Another reminder that decency feels fragile in a system that rewards outrage over responsibility. We organize vigils. We post. We speak. We scream into digital spaces crowded with bots and false selves, hoping for likes and hearts that momentarily reassure us that we are seen, that we are not alone.
And still, the water keeps rising.
So the question becomes unavoidable. How do we stay afloat, not as isolated swimmers, but as a community?
This is the question we will explore this Sunday at UU Miami, in a service titled: The Long Memory of Water: From Cosmic Ice to Living Bodies
We will reflect on water as a cosmic gift-giving traveler and the cradle of life, as the medium through which complexity emerged and consciousness eventually learned to speak. We will remember that our bodies are mostly water, carrying ancient rhythms of tide and flow, entropy and renewal. Water teaches us something essential. Life is not sustained through control, but through balance. Through responsiveness. Through care.
If water remembers where we came from, from stellar dust to cosmic ice to ancestral seas, then perhaps it can also remind us how to live now. Not by denying the depth. Not by pretending the currents are weak. But by learning, together, how to surface for air.