Earth’s Eyes

Scott Lankford
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read
“selective focus of blue-eyed person” by Amanda Dalbjörn on Unsplash

Lakes are the Eyes of the Earth.

That’s the first thing Captain Aqua learned in his global journey. And the last.

But of course Captain Aqua was from the first superhero to say so. For this is precisely the perspective shared by cutting-edge lake scientists, indigenous cultures, and literary scholars like myself worldwide.

As Henry David Thoreau, that celebrated American author whose life and form a sort of aqueous shrine for English Majors, once quipped,

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depths of his own nature.”

Like all metaphors, Thoreau’s coinage has multiple meanings: fringed with forested lashes and gently curved to fit the globe’s own face, a lake absorbs most of the light that falls into it, reflecting back not only its own stormy grey turbulence and moody blues, but our own human moods (and metaphors).

“woman on hammock near to river” by Zach Betten on Unsplash

Much as our own mind’s eye remembers and records all that falls into it — imprinted by that endless flow of photons — so too a lake contains, and physically retains and remembers, nearly everything that falls into it. Gradually drifting to the bottom, there it stays, permanently preserved in the layered grey-matter sediments of the lake’s own muddy depths, curved inward like a human cranium.

“greyscale photography of skeleton” by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Hence to the lake scientists who read and retrieve these mud-layered memories, lakes are not just the eyes of the earth: they are also books; minds; memories; muddy metaphorical time-machines.

The Mac Observer

To cite just one example: cores of layered sediments 135 meters thick recently drilled from 235 meters beneath the surface South America’s Lake Titicaca contain detailed records of climate change, pollen spores, and species variation reaching all the way back to 370,000 years BP. Earth’s oldest lake, Siberia’s Lake Baikal, contains sediments four miles deep that may reach back 30 million years.

Ironically those time-travel properties allow us to peer forward into our shared future — even if it is a nightmare future increasingly clouded by human-induced climate change, chemical pollution, and other impending catastrophes. Like Sibylline aqueous oracles, Earth’s Eyes are unblinking in their ability to see the trutt. And unblinded by hype or hope.

“shallow focus photo of glass orb ornament” by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash

Resilient as they are fragile, ageless as they are ephemeral, lakes can be protected or polluted, held sacred or swamped with sewage. But regardless of how we use them, these aqueous mirrors still reveal us to ourselves, like seeing one’s own reflection mirrored back in the eyes of the ultimate Other. Our Mother.

“marble toy” by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

Which is precisely why looking directly into Earth’s Eyes, as Thoreau once warned, allows each of us to “measure the depths of his own nature.” And perhaps Nature’s own depths as well, at least insofar as our own puny little human craniums may contain them.

As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once quipped, paradoxically, “We both step and do not step into the same river.” Similarly, we both drink and do not drink from the same lake of infinite inspiration. Anything, anything, to slake our infinite thirst.

Scott Lankford

Written by

Author, Adventurer, Activist. Stanford PhD ‘91. Foothill College Prof. “Tahoe beneath the Surface” was named Foreword Magazine Nature Book of the Year in 2010!

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