When the Sun City Lifelong Learning Club’s past president and current instructor Michael Powell asked a group of learners to think about how they use water, participants added to the more obvious drinking and bathing responses boating, fishing, water aerobics, coral reef restoration. Diane Herman referenced hydrotherapy for both animals and humans and Iain Russell spoke to the issue of taking water for granted. “We don’t really think about it,” he said. “It doesn’t appear on a bill if you live in a condo.”

When asked “How do you hear water?” respondents spoke of the healing power of the sound of water and the idea of purification across the centuries and cultures. Bob O’Donnell remembered the fountains at Versailles as spectacular. Powell observed that “water always finds an opening and finds new ways to express itself. In that way, water can be gentle and it can be terrible—in some ways it teaches us the power of adaptability, flow and change as well as persistence and destruction.  It lends itself well to contemplative journeys: like a really good chord in music.”

When water appeared on the planet, life formed, and the beginning of human life was seen in the waters of the placenta. “Without water,” Powell said, “there is no functioning structure because chemical and biological systems are based on hydrogen bonds. Water is cohesive—unique due to the two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and it has a slightly positive charge on one side and a slightly negative charge on the other side.” And, he explained, because the body is 70% water, the systems are based on those hydrogen bonds and help maintain the structural integrity of DNA and proteins. In fact, water impacts the DNA in cells since a sheath of water attaches to the genetic material through the bonds.

Recently an entirely new form of inquiry called “epigenetics” attempts to study the effect of trauma transferred from one generation to another: when one inherits from a grandparent, do they also inherit that person’s trauma? It just might be one unusual way of water working in the body.

Participants were surprised to learn that the amount of water currently used in the Metropolitan region is the same as years ago because, Powell said, “we grew houses instead of crops!” The economics of water is the science of scarcity and how to reconcile that with abundance. Ways of distribution are critical, and the learners were referred to the just released ASU Water Innovation Initiative. Just last month, according to this study, most water systems in Arizona charge on the average $41 per month for 4000 gallons of water.

More information about water in Arizona can be accessed via the Kyl Center for Water Policy at waterinnoivation.asu.edu/resources/faqs.

Powell joins more than 30 instructors who volunteer their time and expertise to a community of Sun City learners in the Lifelong Learning Club, a chartered Recreation Centers of Sun City club.

Email scazlifelong@gmail.com for more information.