Meet Montana: What's Your Problem, C Falls Water?

Part 2 of Story 4

What's Your Problem, C Falls Water? Why you gotta treat me so hard?

When I was just a young pup, I recall learning that Abraham Lincoln is said to have approached conflict with the following guiding principle:

"I do not like that man. I must get to know him better."

Whoa, I recall thinking, with my french rolled jeans and permed hair.

Impression made. That was a whole lot different than I had ever seen acted out IRL. It stuck with me. And while I was admittedly pretty awful at remembering this in times of heated exchange, this approach never left me. It continued to return to my awareness with the same profundity.

So let's Abe Link this hard water situation, shall we?

You're so hard you made my skin sensitive, my hair like a tumbleweed, and you destroyed my beloved dishwasher.

And yet - here I am, trying to get to know you better.

What is your nature, C Falls water? How does "hard" actually express? What are you, molecularly?

I went down that rabbit hole for longer than I care to admit.

And after all of it -  the chemistry, the geology, the mineral content breakdowns, the ion diagrams - the single greatest TLDR I can offer is this:

The minerals in hard water ionize into positively charged particles - Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺ - that are electrochemically designed to seek and bond to negatively charged surfaces. Which is basically everything they touch.

In other words: hard water is, at its molecular core, built to grip. Bind. Attach. It's not a behavior. It's a nature. It has collapsed into form so concrete that all other possibility no longer exists. Concluded in its stance, with conviction.

Verdictful. Hard water is verdictful. While I'm over here finding value in being verdictless. 

Nature is my teacher, so I knew at this collision point, there was an opportunity for insight awaiting me.

In its defense, it's not the water itself that holds the conviction of verdict. It's the minerals in the land that the water travelled through on its way to my well and later, my pipes. And this special area in the northwest corner of Montana was created by ancient glaciers that left the land rich in magnesium and iron.

As fundamental elements of reality, they are not open to possibility. They couldn't be. They exist to bind to things. To bond. That is their nature and their purpose.

Here's what I mean by that.

Pure water - H₂O in its completely undisturbed state - is almost entirely un-ionized. It arrives clean. Carrying almost nothing. This is why distilled water is so chemically inert, and why it's used in skincare products, for example.  No ions, no charge, no agenda. Water is the most extraordinary solvent on earth, which means it becomes what it moves through.

As it travels through the ancient glacial rock of northwestern Montana - through limestone, through calcium and magnesium rich deposits that glaciers spent thousands of years grinding into this valley - those minerals dissolve into it. And when they dissolve, they ionize. They shed electrons and become positively charged particles. Calcium becomes Ca²⁺. Magnesium becomes Mg²⁺.

The land didn't contaminate the water.

The land charged it.

And now those positively charged ions are moving through the pipes looking for what they were always designed to find.

Which brings me to the part that stopped me mid-research.

The hair shaft is negatively charged. Skin is negatively charged. The heating element of a countertop dishwasher is negatively charged.

Opposites attract.

When hard water contacts these surfaces, the calcium and magnesium ions don't rinse away. They bond. Electrochemically. Ionically.

One of the strongest forms of molecular attraction in chemistry. This is why no amount of rinsing fixes it. This is why my products sat on top of my skin instead of penetrating it. This is why my dishwasher's heating element eventually burned out - cycle after cycle, the minerals precipitated out of the heated water and deposited themselves directly onto the element as limescale, building an insulating crust of essentially limestone until the element couldn't function anymore.

The water brought the glacier into my kitchen.

One cycle at a time.

Until the glacier won.

Nature built an ion that seeks surfaces and holds on.

This was indeed, most inconvenient for my mental map.

Because, from all that I've learned studying ancient texts, I know what the mystics say about clinging.

All of them. All of them.

Buddhism calls it upādāna - clinging, grasping, attachment - and identifies it as the root of suffering. It's a perceptual failing. When you cling, you cannot see reality as it is. You see only what your attachment allows through.

The Tao Te Ching says it quietly but without ambiguity: free from attachment, you see the wonder. Clinging, you see only the surface. Lao Tzu spent eighty-one chapters describing what reality looks like when you stop gripping it, and what it costs you when you don't.

Non-duality points to the same place from a different angle - that the grip is what makes the illusion of separation feel real. Release it and the boundary between you and the thing you were holding dissolves.

Vedanta. Stoicism. Zen. Every tradition of clear-eyed teachers who looked most carefully at reality - who I trust precisely because their teachings aren't ideology, they're observation - arrived at the same address from different directions.

Don't cling.

As a description of what clear seeing requires.

So here I was.

Nature built an ion electrochemically designed to seek surfaces and bond to them. And every tradition of humans who studied nature most carefully came back and said: clinging is the thing that keeps you from reality.

How can nature produce the very thing it tells us not to do?

Nature isn't saying it's good.

Nature isn't saying it's bad.

Nature just... made it.

I had smuggled in an assumption somewhere beneath my deep belief that natural equals good: that what nature produces, nature endorses. That natural equals sanctioned. That if something exists in the natural world, nature is giving it a thumbs up.

But nature doesn't have thumbs.

Nature has no ideology. No hierarchy of better and worse. The scorpion and the clover. The flood and the drought. The positively charged calcium ion and the surface it bonds to. Nature produced all of it with the same complete absence of verdict.

The mystics weren't arguing with nature. They were doing what they always do - looking carefully at the human experience and reporting back what they saw. They looked at clinging and said: here's what it costs you. Here's what it blocks. Here's what you can't see while you're gripping.

Which brought me, eventually, to something I'd studied years before that I hadn't fully understood at the time.

Years ago, in a period of looking for answers, I found myself sitting with the I Ching.

If you're not familiar, it's an ancient Chinese text - one of the oldest books in existence - used as an oracle. You throw quarters, generate a hexagram, and the corresponding reading is meant to offer guidance for whatever question you brought.

I'll be honest. I wanted answers and I didn't get them. Not directly, anyway. The hexagrams were layered and paradoxical and rarely said what I wanted them to say. I didn't know what to do with them at the time.

But what I've come to realize years later is that the I Ching wasn't trying to give me answers.

It was trying to give me a way of seeing.

Every hexagram describes a state. Not a fixed state - a moment in a cycle. Accumulation. Peak. Release. Return. The whole text is essentially a map of how energy moves through systems - all systems, always - in a continuous arc that never actually stops anywhere. It doesn't prescribe what's good or bad. It describes what's happening and what naturally comes next.

What it taught me, slowly and without announcing it, is that reality is not a series of static positions.

It's a living system.

Always moving. Always cycling. Accumulating, then releasing. Building, then returning.

The question the I Ching kept asking me -  in every hexagram, in every reading -  was not what is this but where are you in the cycle.

I didn't have language for that then. But it rewired something in me that I'm still drawing on.

So back to the hard water...

The positive and negative charge assignment - the ionic polarity that makes hard water cling - isn't a flaw in the system.

It's the mechanism of exchange itself.

It's how matter moves. How things get where they need to go. How systems communicate across boundaries.

At the cellular level, the sodium-potassium pump that runs every cell in your body works by maintaining a charge difference across the cell membrane. That gradient is what powers the cell. Collapse the gradient and the cell dies.

At the ecosystem level, minerals move from rock to water to soil to plant to animal and back to earth through a chain of ionic exchanges. Each handoff happens because something is positively charged and something else is negatively charged and they find each other. The whole nutrient cycle is an ionic story.

At the atmospheric level, lightning itself is a charge exchange. Positive charge building in clouds, negative charge on the earth's surface, and eventually the difference becomes so great that electrons jump across the gap to equalize. The strike is violent. The result is equilibrium.

Without polarity there is no movement. Without movement there is no exchange. Without exchange there is no life.

The positive calcium ion seeks the negative surface because that seeking is the delivery mechanism. That's the whole design. The charge difference creates the gradient. The gradient creates the flow. The flow is the system working.

The mystics who say don't cling aren't saying don't be charged. They're not saying dissolve your polarity and become neutral. They're saying don't freeze the exchange mid-arc. Don't hold the calcium at the surface when it was supposed to keep moving. Don't accumulate past the point where delivery was supposed to happen.

Stay in the flow. Complete the cycle. Let what you're carrying go where it was always supposed to go.

The charge itself isn't the problem.

It never was.

It's what makes everything possible.

So then, the final question I had was...

If accumulation is a phase - if the water's hardness is not its permanent nature but a temporary state mid-arc - then what happens to hard water when we leave it alone? Where does it actually go?

In nature, hard water flows toward lower ground. Into rivers. Into streams. Into wetlands and soil. And along the way, it delivers. The calcium and magnesium it's been carrying get deposited into the earth, feeding plants and microorganisms and entire ecosystems that evolved specifically because mineral-rich water runs through that terrain.

The hardness isn't incidental.

The accumulation was the point.

The water was carrying those minerals somewhere they were genuinely needed, to living systems that had been waiting for exactly this.

And then the water reaches open surface. It evaporates. And when water evaporates, it leaves everything it was carrying behind. The minerals stay in the soil. The water itself rises as vapor.

Pure. Soft. Carrying nothing.

It becomes clouds. It falls as rain. It begins the whole journey again from zero.

The I Ching, confirmed. In chemistry. In the water cycle I learned in fourth grade and apparently needed to relearn in a guest house in Montana at forty-something.

The clinging was always supposed to let go.

The problem was never the water.

We extracted it mid-journey.

Water mid-cycle - full of minerals, mid-delivery, not yet at the evaporation that would have restored it - and we took it. Put it in a well. Ran it through pipes and 90-degree angles and pressurized systems and routed it to a bathroom in a guest house in Columbia Falls, Montana.

And then issued a verdict.

Hard water: bad.

Without ever asking what it was in the middle of when we interrupted it.

Nature wasn't being inconsistent. We interrupted the cycle before the correction could come.

And then blamed the water.

Gah. Humans are so unnatural. We don't do anything according to nature. We interrupt cycles. It tires me. Because I'm trying so hard to build a life back in congruence with nature and yet because I'm human with my human ways, and live in these civilized pathways, I'm stuck with some level of dissonance.

I think a lot of you know that specific exhaustion -  the one that comes from the isolation of seeing clearly. From caring deeply about something you cannot fully live. From feeling the gap between what is and what your whole system knows should be, and not being able to close it all the way. Not from a tap, anyway.

Neither option at my sink is the water before the terrain got to it.

Hard water interrupted mid-cycle, carrying a load meant for soil, doing damage in a context that was never its destination. City water stripped and processed and chlorinated into a different kind of incompletion.

I'm not choosing the good one.

I'm choosing between two interrupted cycles.

And the tiredness of that -  the tiredness of being a human who sees this, who cares about this, who moved to Montana specifically to get closer to something real and still washes her face every morning with water that never got to finish its journey -

Some days that just... 

Tires me.

But here's where I landed.

I didn't find this part myself. It found me, in the middle of sitting with all of the above.

I am not outside of nature.

Even here. Even with my pipes and my filters and my city-water-preferring body and my very human dissonance about all of it.

I am nature that became aware of itself.

And the awareness -  the tiredness, the longing for coherence, the inability to simply accept the interruption and move on - that is nature working through me. The correction the I Ching describes doesn't only move through watersheds and weather systems and mineral deposits in soil. It moves through humans too. It moves through the ones who get tired enough of the interruption that they move to Montana and decide to run their whole life as an experiment. It moves through the ones who sit with a question about tap water long enough to find the teaching inside it.

The noticing is not separate from the cycle.

The noticing is the cycle.

You might be the part of the cycle that notices the interruption. And the noticing - the uncomfortable, unresolved, fatiguing noticing - might be exactly what your piece of the arc is supposed to deliver.

Before it releases. Before it rains. Before it starts again.

Hard water isn't bad water. It's water that was taken before it could finish. Water carrying something it was always meant to put down. Water whose clinging - electrochemical, purposeful, natural - was designed to end in delivery and release, not in a pipe, not in a guest house, not on my hair at six in the morning.

It was never bad.

It was just mid-journey when we took it.

Aren't we all.

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