Holy Water: An Autoethnography of Learning From Water on a Transformative Path

Michelle Boyle

Dreaming Ancestral Waters

On a hillside at the northern end of the Apennine Mountains in Italy, I helped my ancestor climb out of a grave with a wide marble capstone. As soon as she emerged, she grabbed my shovel and started digging furiously, making a mound of soft brown dirt so large it could not possibly have all come out of the grave. Satisfied, and paying no heed to the dirt caking her velvet robes, she shoved the capstone open wider with the vigor of her years leading armies on horseback. Taking my hand, she guided me down through a dirt tunnel descending at a steep diagonal for miles into the earth. Eventually we emerged in a massive underground cavern glowing with white rock and light. There were men and women everywhere, smiling and happily talking and singing; bathing and celebrating in pools around a massive artesian spring in the center. This, she said, was the source of their power.

Upon waking, I came across a documentary explaining the geological history of the mountains my ancestor and I had traveled under in the dream. It began 250 million years ago with the Tethys (LaMacchia, 2014), a sea so vast during the Mesozoic era that it stretched across what is now the Eurasian landmass. The Tethys, it turns out, was named for the Greek goddess of the sacred freshwater font at the center of the world. Wife of the ocean, she was identified with heaven as well, and mother to the world’s springs, streams, fountains, and rivers. Her caves and caverns were mentioned repeatedly in ancient texts as the source for all of those waters (Quintus, 1996).

I’ll be visiting caves, springs, and streams next month when I travel to central Italy to present at a conference that I first learned about in a different dream. My itinerary for those days will trace some of the remnants of the Tethys, which burble to the surface from far beneath the Apennines. The prospect of pilgrimage to these ancestral waters got me thinking about all the ways I have sourced from water along the way—all the ways this precious element has nourished and taught me on my path.

My conscious spiritual journey began twenty-five years ago with motherhood, bodywork, meditation, horses, land, water, and mountain lions. It led me through madness, memories, and much love, to healing—which in turn led to an integral academic path of graduate studies. Rooted in an ancestral healing project and conceived as a response to the collective ecological, spiritual, and social crises of the Anthropocene, my current doctoral research has evolved into a Terrapsychological and Ethnoautobiographical inquiry into ancestral lands in northern Italy (Kremer, 2014; Chalquist, 2020). Dream, synchronicity, and ancestral guidance led to the site selection for my upcoming trip. Those sites and others pertain to my medieval and Renaissance ancestors as well as both their ancient and Neolithic tribal predecessors. The sites and the ancestors I’m working with have been instrumental in my own journey through our collective transformation. Water has too, arising at pivotal moments along the way.

Like many, I’ve been drawn to water for healing (Nelson, 2014; McAnally, 2018), and I’ve often experienced that the consciousness of water flows from one place to a distant other; connecting, rather than separating, places in space and time. Though the concept of the memory of water is contested in Western literature (Hall, 2007; Milgrom, 2007; Groenfeldt, 2018; Emoto, 2008; Lower, 2015), it is a central tenet of Indigenous understanding of water. Katrina Walters of the Choctaw Nation, in her address to the 2014 International Indigenous Research conference, emphasized that water transcends time and space and in doing so connects us to ancestors past and future (McGregor, 2014). Deborah McGregor elaborates with the Anishinaabek understanding that waters as well as people hold intergenerational trauma, and that “waters themselves as sentient beings (are) in need of healing from historical traumas” (p. 72). She and Melissa Nelson point to the interrelational nature of original waterways and their fundamental importance to the health of ecosystems both on the land and in individual humans. The damming and diversion of that natural flow through colonial projects has negatively impacted individual, regional, and planetary health (McGregor, 2014; Nelson, 2014).

Notwithstanding those divisions and damage, Indigenous knowledge is resilient, and gaining—perhaps in part due to our dire need of it as well as the fierce and generous efforts of Indigenous scholars—ever increasing acceptance in the Euro-Western academy (Nelson, 2014; Twance, 2018). Nelson states:

The perception of water bodies as having a life force or spirit, and being in some way alive, appears to be universal among indigenous peoples, and is also well established in the histories of European peoples, who once met the criteria of being indigenous. Perhaps it is this very memory of a tribal, pre-modern heritage that underlies the disdain of contemporary water planners for animistic beliefs.

Could the same be true of skeptics and adherents of scientism (Hall, 2007; Lower, 2015)? The vitriol and rage sometimes present in the arguments of those defending rationalist perspectives is certainly suggestive of the unhealed trauma present in the Western lineage, which continues to have violent impact on BIPOC communities and bodies (Menakem, 2017). Menakem makes clear how those of us of European descent have transferred, and continue to transfer, our unhealed intergenerational trauma onto bodies, communities, and lands we encounter, and says that “white people must acknowledge their racialized trauma, move through clean pain, and grow up” (2017, p.262). As a white woman healing personal trauma, I am called to participate in the healing of Euro-Western intergenerational and collective trauma, and to do so I seek the relational knowledge held in my bones and the lands of my ancestors.

The connection between water, body, and memory persists “despite the ruptures of colonialism” (Nxumalo, 2020, p. 61; Rhagavan, 2020). In my own ancestral healing pilgrimages on the Italian peninsula, I seek to understand the layers of colonial violence (Catholic? Roman? Kurgan?) experienced by my ancestors there through direct somatic and ritual inquiry. To ask, as Diné-Welsh scholar Lyla June Johnston did in response to a ceremonial experience of her European indigenous ancestors:

(W)hen and how did this egalitarian, earth-loving, woman-honoring culture, become the colonial, genocidal conquerors that washed upon American shores? Could it be that our beloved Indigenous European ancestors were raped and tortured for so many thousands of years that they forgot who they were? Could it be they lived in a pressure cooker of oppression for so long that conquer-or-be-conquered is all they knew? (2019, p.4)

I seek these answers in what is unsaid, as much as what is said, in textual histories. As importantly, I seek them in my own body, in ancestral lands, and in the water.

Water’s memory is indeed long. Much of the water we encounter on earth is extraterrestrial in origin and older than the sun itself (McAnally, 2018). Anishinaabe histories “do not just include the time span of human history, but the time before—when Nanabozho and other spirits walked the earth” (Twance, 2018). Greek mythology, so foundational to the conscious arc of Western culture, speaks to that time as well, and Tethys is an expression of our cultural memory of it. While I was sunbathing to recharge during a break from writing, my ancestors urged me to remember that I was a child of the heavens and stars as much as of the earth and waters. Each of us—each being on the planet—is a unique expression of that meeting of heaven and earth.

Manasarovar, a Himalayan lake at nearly 15,000 feet, is one such expression, and another remnant of the Tethys Sea. The combination of the depths of Manasarovar and the heights of Mt. Kailash rising above it are a symbol of the union of Shiva and Shakti (Sharma, 2004). A place of pilgrimage due to its spiritual properties, it is, according to Sadhguru, “a place that played a pivotal role in the spiritual evolution and most likely even the physical evolution of the human species” (2022, para.1). Priding himself on being the “absolutely logical” and “straight-talking guru”, he says, “when I went to Manasarovar, for the first time I saw things happening there that I never ever believed possible… Beneath the lake, there is a space where something beyond what we can logically imagine is happening, and this process is yet to be deciphered. It is a huge cavity with various kinds of life processes happening there…” (Sadhguru, 2022). The waters in Manasarovar stem from the same source as the remnants of the Tethys in central Italy, and I wonder what properties I will encounter there, whether the meeting of divine feminine and masculine might be present in a resonant way, and what effect that might have on me. It brings to mind another place and time where I made regular pilgrimage to mountain and water—at the beginning of my journey.

Learning From Water

Crystal Springs

Water has much to teach us about love, acceptance, flow, and existing harmoniously on the planet (Groenfeldt, 2003; Villasenor-Galarza, 2013; McAnally, 2018). Regardless of the empirical truth or untruth of the memory of water, the metaphor of water offers us increased access to spirit, emotion, and memory (Nelson, 2014). As a very young woman I found unprecedented levels of all three through my earth-based spiritual practice at the Crystal Springs Reservoir, at the foot of a stretch of the northern Santa Cruz Mountains in California. I too experienced things that I had never believed possible, and was influenced by the energies emanating from the depths of the lake, despite their complication by human engineering and suffering. The reservoir and surrounding lands became one of my most important teachers.

Crystal Springs lies at the edge between one of the country’s most populated, economically driven areas and a pristine wilderness. Such a juxtaposition creates a fertile tension in the consciousness of the landscape. The lake itself lies over an older, natural lake which in turn lay over the San Andreas fault—there is deep, primal, power here as well. The Greek style water temple celebrates the arrival of the waters that fill the dam from Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, flooded—for the purpose of watering San Francisco—after a bitter historical fight (Hetch-Hetchy, 2017). The water from Hetch Hetchy joins waters from multiple local watersheds in an ambitious engineering project that changed the lands and waterways irrevocably. Farmers in Spring Valley and residents of the Crystal Springs resort town lost their homes and livelihoods with the creation of the reservoir. Long before that, at least one of the several Ohlone tribes that lived in this watershed and along the shores of the paradisiacal lake were exterminated by the Spanish missionaries they had graciously welcomed into their lands.

Sitting by my horse out on the trail above the reservoir one day, I fell into a trance and saw the Ohlone tribe that had belonged to that canyon as they had been before the missionaries arrived. They showed me some of what had been lost—their cherished way of life, deep embeddedness in the land, and the joy that arose from it (in other places on the peninsula I encountered the rage and devastation held in the land from colonial genocide, but here, they only showed me what had been before). That was the first time in my life I communicated with ancestral spirits. These were ancestors of the place, not of my lineage, but it was they and their land who first taught me to listen to and feel the earth. Several elements in my life at the time made me unusually receptive and allowed me to perceive them.

My heart had opened wide through mothering my daughter, bodywork, and the beginnings of a mindfulness practice, and broke open wider through the end of my young marriage, stress, and loneliness. I withdrew from society as much as possible while still functioning to some degree as a young working single mother in an intensely populated area. I was drawn again and again to the solace I felt from the water and the wild, and spent hours riding bareback in the rain and sitting in meditation facing the lake, communing with the spirits of the living and the dead there. I learned to communicate with plants and to follow animals through their energetic trail on the land. I was given, through grace, a glimpse of what was possible living in deep intimacy with the land, and of what belonging might be like.

I experienced both spiritual source and deep grief by the water’s edge—qualities which arose directly from the land and water itself, but which also resonated with and awakened something deep inside me. I dreamed that I danced a snake dance, and a dam burst, flooding a dry waterway. A pain I had felt, but not understood, for years, began to move from where it was dammed deep within my psyche, and along with it a great love. One day, walking along the trail (which I called my rosary beads by way of naming the repetitive, devotional nature of my practice there), I felt a tidal wave of love explode from my heart out into the land, and felt the land return it right back to me. I experienced in those moments, a lessening of gravity’s grasp on my body, and though my feet still touched the earth I could feel myself beginning to rise off it. It was not long after that day that I experienced an intense spiritual emergency, in which my energetic and nervous systems were flooded by energies that tore down any obstructions to love. I experienced ecstasy, unitive consciousness, and a complete relinquishing of all my identities (structures containing my essence). There was simultaneously a subterranean earthquake in my psyche which dislodged material buried there since childhood.

By the time my floodwaters receded, and I had recovered from and integrated that experience, it was thirteen years later. Only then was I able to access and begin to digest the unearthed material—the repressed memories—that had kept a part of me trapped in childhood, and in survival consciousness. By then I had another child—my beautiful son, whose spirit I had called to me by the lake—and had embarked on graduate studies.

Holy Water

In the aftermath of my memories (and of my second marriage), my son and I landed in a series of small, rustic, homes on the wildish-rural California coast. One of these was a former bootlegger’s cabin in the redwood forest near the town of Pescadero. It was a place of respite and healing for us, where close connection with the elements and the soothing darkness of the forest helped restore my nervous system and my soul. We played and prayed (and visited with the newts and banana slugs) daily in the creek just outside our home. From it we drew our drinking and bathing water—once in a while challenged by aggressive neighbors who were known to differ, at times at gunpoint, with our landlords in their understanding of water rights. We filled our hot tub too, where I floated while meditating on the wind in the treetops. One of the creek’s sources was a seasonal spring, edged by green moss, on the ridge above our cabin. We made regular pilgrimages up to her as well, to drink directly from her, to paint our faces with her mud, and to sing to her. Another spring at the bottom of the ridge had been built into a spring box by the bootleggers and the deep water looked thick, black and oily—a danger we learned to avoid. We should have sung there too. One day in the creek my six-year-old son informed me that all water that ran free on the earth was holy water. I was, and am, inclined to agree.

Rites of Passage

During our last spring in the redwoods, I traveled to the Mendocino National Forest with fellow graduate students for a wilderness rite of passage. For my three-day solo fast, I chose (or was chosen by) a spot on the rocky beach near the confluence of Bear Creek and the Rice Fork of the Eel River, in Pomo territory just downstream from a hot spring burbling from under a boulder. The site I originally was drawn to was at the top of a hill, and the change to the river site —chosen by the scared child I arrived as—was a significant part of my transformative process there. I spent much of my time there cycling between the water and the sun-warmed rocks, nourishing my nervous system and recovering from the exhaustion of my daily life. Mary Oliver’s poem “Sleeping in the Forest” speaks to the intimacy and elemental essence of that experience, particularly the line, “I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed” (2017).

More happened in those days than rest and recovery, and more than I can do justice to here. But I spoke at length with my maternal grandfather’s spirit, and forgave him (unexpectedly) for atrocities committed. Hours were spent floating and swimming in the deeper parts of the water, and standing in it waist deep, singing songs of gratitude while tears streamed from my eyes. There were conversations with ancestral spirits of the place too, and gifts from them, both ones I could carry with me and ones I carry forever in my soul. I will carry too the blessing of Osprey—flying between realms and exploding into the water three feet in front of me and out again with a huge fish—like the electric whoop of joy and exhilaration that exploded out of my body with the beat of his wings. When I left the river, I walked into the ceremonial circle as an adult for the first time in my life, at age forty-three.

Having spent so much of my chronological adulthood turning inward, by necessity and for survival on multiple levels, when I returned home from the wilderness and water, I felt finally ready, aligned, and resourced to find my way into service to the larger earth community. My dissertation project emerged clearly during this time, and out of it my second career and life’s work are beginning to develop—my healing practice has expanded from bodywork to trauma and spiritual emergence counseling, and I’ve begun to teach. I am writing about the gifts that arise from ancestral healing, earth-based knowing, and recovery from intergenerational trauma. In each of these endeavors, I am motivated by how I can best serve the whole, through giving fuller expression to my essence, rather than focused on personal survival. I’m beginning to do, in small increments, what I came here to do. Shortly after my rite of passage, I was given a more immediate opportunity for service as well.

Rio Abajo Rio

Like many, I had been knocked off my feet by wave after wave of shock and grief since the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, and the surreal daily news that followed. One of the worst, and most triggering, aspects of that experience was feeling powerless against a narcissistic, misogynistic abuser in authority. When an opportunity to push back, even a little, landed in my lap I jumped at it. A woman in my community decided, rather than hosting a lavish party for her fiftieth birthday, to use the same funds to take women who wanted to go to support the asylum seekers arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, and I joined the group in October of 2019.

Aware of the problematic potential for a white savior complex in such a trip, I was grateful that the organizer had arranged to work with, and be directed by, local Indigenous organizations in our destination of Brownsville, Texas. I was able to let go into the journey, and feel into what I might be able to offer my companions. Thinking about where we were going, I realized I would see the Rio Grande for the first time, and feeling the magnitude of that being on multiple levels, knew it would be important to connect with the river.

For most of our time there our hands, bodies, and minds were busy from morning to night just trying to make small inroads into the immediate overwhelming need for food, water, and shelter for the nine hundred men, women, and children living under the bridge on the Mexican side of the Rio in Matamoros. In moments here and there I was able to make observations, and drop into the land and the river. I registered the impact of the border fence, which had been there 10-15 years but had been augmented in obscene ways by the then-current administration.

The border wall made manifest the idea that “A fortified border is not just a very tall fence: it also rears as a psychic division, a cleavage of the heart, a spiritual dam, a cultural barrier, a split within the self, a political regression, and an ecological absurdity” (Chalquist, 2008, p. xii). The ugliness and violence of the black steel and razor wire fence stood in glaring contrast to the life and spirit of the river just beyond it, where we could see plants on the banks waving gently in the wind as sunlight sparkled on the softly rushing water. Our guide, Sergio Cordova of Team Brownsville, told of his childhood there at a time when there was no fence, and people from both sides of the border could walk freely back and forth. He also pointed out the place where the refugees came to the river to wash and bathe, where many of them had drowned trying to swim across. While the spirit of the river was clear and strong, the predominant experience in my first meeting with her was of separation and loss.

That experience was intensified in the following days serving food in the camp, providing hours of therapeutic massage to the asylum seekers’ traumatized bodies, and singing and praying with them while standing together in the filthy, polluted, holy, and life-giving waters of the Rio, where the bloated body of a horse bumped against the U.S. bank, opposite the crosses honoring those who had drowned trying to swim to safety. I channeled some of that intensity into political and ritual disturbance at the sham tent courts with the women I came with, drumming and crying out what our hearts felt until (and after) they pointed machine guns at us, but I still came home possessed, to some degree, by La Llorona, whom I had encountered at the river’s edge.

La Llorona is simultaneously an Indigenous social justice borderlands figure from the 1500s and a mythic spirit from a much more ancient tale about “a river of life that became a river of death” (Éstes, 2003, p. 325). Shannon Wilson names La Llorona’s appearance as a call to life and strength rather than death, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes says that when she appears it is necessary to cleanse the rio abajo rio—river under the river or the river of our own creative energies—of its pollution so a woman can regain access to her creative force (Éstes, 2003; Wilson, 2010). My conversations and connection with La Llorona became a part of my continued integration and healing and a deepening into my larger inquiry. Her cries for justice and what was lost in the waters taught me, after everything, to better tend my own currents.

Pescadero

Back home, my son and I had moved out of the woods and into the sun, close to the town of Pescadero and the ocean, and at the edge of the marsh, where the brackish waters proved to be another important teacher. During this time my studies in ecopsychology and archetypal mythology brought a new dimension
to my old earth-based practice, and I frequently hiked out into the marsh and stayed there awhile, dropping in to the rich ecosystem nourished by the brackish waters. The waters came to visit me too.

Choked by sludge from upstream deforestation, the waterways in the marsh had not flowed clearly in many years, and during the rainy season there was heavy flooding. I had been warned we might get “a little water” around the house, but I realized the extent of it the first time I had to make a late-night rescue of our elderly goat from her pen in our backyard, a foot and a half deep in water. As I half rolled, half floated her out in my son’s old wagon, the muddy waters swirled over and into the top of my boots. Even as the waters receded, they rose again with each ocean tide, dark and mysterious and full of nutrients and pollution from the ocean and the mountains. I could feel the cold currents tugging and slapping at my legs and my soul every time I walked in or out of my house.

It was then that I entered the phase of trauma recovery for one aspect of memory I had not been resourced enough to face until that time. Simultaneously, through synchronicity, through spontaneous visions in the marsh and through dreams and imaginal journeys in my home at the edge of it, I began to access my own ancestral lineage. The month I moved into that house my family gifted me with a six-inch stack of genealogical records compiled by an ancestor in the 1940s, along with framed three-dimensional topographical maps of our ancestral lands in Italy’s Lombardy and Piedmont regions, which they had because we used to live there, unaware of any other connection. I found the connection, and our lineage, within weeks, and the flow began.

Grail knights appeared in the marsh and I danced with a sword in my backyard. I ascended a waterfall through which souls were swimming up to the Milky Way, who was a goddess spiral dancing in the stars, and talked and danced with her awhile before coming back down the star-water path and having an experience as that goddess giving ecstatic birth to each soul entering the planet. Shortly after, a mentor steered me toward the ancient Persian goddess of the waters and heavens, Anahita, and I learned of her direct connections to Grail lore and the Lady of the Lake (Farrokh, 2013). I began receiving specific information and direct guidance through dream and vision that would then be corroborated through my research. As I nearly came completely undone, once more, by the most difficult part of my own story, I seemed to have tapped in, through the confluence of the waters of the marsh with my psychic waters, to an inexhaustible flow of ancestral gifts and guidance that resourced me for each new wave.

Sacred Well

Another year and a half later, we were living in a sprawling Santa Cruz farmhouse dating to the 1800s (with a hearth dating from the 1600s, connecting us in time to the ancestors I was studying) with my daughter, her partner, and their new baby. From there I made my first ancestral healing pilgrimage to northern Italy, and my first trip there in over three decades. I landed in Milan, my old home of many years, just as it emerged as the center of the Covid pandemic, in March of 2020. Water was a constant teacher and companion throughout that journey. At the Llobregat River and estuary on layover in Barcelona; through the moon’s reflection in the Ticino River and the marshes of Milan; through its absence in holy water fonts in all the churches I entered; through its insistent rising from under the ancient floor of the Milan cathedral and the pre-Christian sites that pre-dated it; through the springs on the Antica Mulattiera trail and the Po river in Piemonte; and through the thunderous and torrential blessing of rain on the Milan Duomo: water had a persistent and meaningful impact on my journey. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of water as a vessel for spirit: an idea as old as humanity, but a new revelation for me and one that continues through my inquiry.

When struggling with the painful shifts caused by the pandemic after my return home (which were, in truth, symptoms of clearing the collective psychic waters), I cried out to my ancestors one night for support. They said clearly in unison, “There is a sacred well in Brescia.” Though it was not far from Milan, I had never been to Brescia and knew nothing about it, but as it turned out they were right and there is a renowned healing spring in the mountains just north of the city. I was confused at the time about what that had to do with my cry for help, but it began a rich line of inquiry, centering on healing springs and sacred wells, that has become integral to my larger project.

Texas flood

The ancestral flow begun with that journey carried me to northern Texas, of all places, where my son and I make our home now. Our horses live steps from our back door, another ancestral gift and dream come true. They traveled separately, but we packed the dog and the cat, the houseplants, six hens, and a rooster into a moving van and drove across the country. When we arrived, I saw there was a pond in the pasture I hadn’t realized was there, having rented the place sight unseen. It was shaped exactly like a giant version of our old spring in the redwoods, and on its bank stood a proper world tree—one that participates visibly (and in my experience, energetically) in the world tree archetype. The small stream which fed the pond was named, according to the map, Loving Branch. It felt like we had found sanctuary.

That night, there was a thunderstorm unprecedented in any of our new neighbors’ memory. Thunderstorms, unlike in the Bay Area, are so common here that I began to study the ancient art of lightning divination, but this one stood out. We fell asleep watching the lightning, and were awakened the next morning by our rooster screaming like the world was ending. I looked out in disbelief, as our yard and pasture were submerged in swirling muddy waters over a foot deep. We waded through the floodwaters and the lightning, barefoot and in sandals, to bring the chickens to safety in the house, and so our Texas adventure (and my dissertation work in earnest) began. It could have seemed catastrophic, but felt like a blessing and a welcome, and the flood receded quickly with little damage done.

Drought

These days we would welcome a little flooding, as our area, along with much of the state, has experienced weeks of triple digit temperatures and no rain. The pond and stream are cracked and dry. Even the pool has cracked, as it seems the very earth seeks whatever water it can find. I have wondered, as I was so quick to wax rhapsodic about the ancestral blessing signified by the flood, about the significance of the drought. At the largest level, it is a symptom of climate change and the disruption to the hydrological cycle caused by global warming, and the turbulence in the collective psyche inextricably intertwined. Certainly, I have wondered about the hundred thousand people who have moved to the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex in the last year alone, and the impact of their water use on the many north Texas rivers and lakes. What might that do to the rivers’ ability, in Indigenous terms, to do their job?

At a personal practice level, I connect with the land we live on (Wichita, Tawakoni, and Kiikaapoi territory) each morning when I fill the horse trough. The water pressure is low and it takes a long time: these moments are my rosary now. When I inquired about the drought, what I sensed from the land was a deep, deep, breath drawn in and held. I experience being in the tension of that inhale in this moment, but it feels like an exhale is coming. I am grateful for this land where I live, and the gift of the waters here to come into ever deeper relationship to.

Conclusion

Thinking back over two decades of my journey with water, and how it has supported, healed, nourished, and transformed my body, mind, and soul from where I began, I am astonished and moved to tears. Not only has there been the expected theme of inspiration derived through the flow of healing waters, but a theme of the blockage of water. Many times I encountered the trauma of a rupture in the land and its story mirroring blocks and ruptures in my own systems. That noticing supports my understanding of ecological complexes, “thematic knots or junctures where human and ecological wounding combine” (Chalquist, 2020, p. 76), and the importance and tremendous potential of tending to those complexes at personal and collective levels. Tending to and learning from water on my own path has increased my capacity for participating in the collective healing of our planetary waters, both literal and metaphorical.

As a young woman, I was drawn to the waters of the Crystal Springs reservoir. I responded to their call, not understanding it but trusting its pull. In retrospect, I intuited that the waters could teach me a truth, and a way of knowing, that my soul needed in its unerring instinct toward wholeness. Now, my ancestors and the waters themselves call me to springs, rivers, and caves in Italy. I respond, not knowing yet what complex will be uncovered, but knowing that the mystery of water will once again play a role in my soul’s movement toward wholeness.

As each soul makes that journey toward wholeness we have the opportunity to clear stagnant waters, and to make a more whole world together through responding with sensitivity and discernment to the living, loving, planet who is calling us at every turn. While the exact nature of our response depends on our own gifts and proclivities, we each have a role to play. Where are you called? It may seem frivolous or self-indulgent to speak of love (or play) in relation to water in the face of serious environmental issues, but among the Anishinaabek (and many other Indigenous peoples) these ideals are considered far from naïve. Relational principles have allowed Indigenous cultures to live harmoniously with the earth for thousands of years, and “may in fact prove to be of utmost relevance in our quest for sustainability” (McGregor, 2014, p. 71).

Toward that end I invite you, if you do not already have one, to try a practice with water. Learn, if you do not already know, where the water you drink and clean with comes from—all the way to the top of each ridge or rise where it begins to gather—and how it gets to you. Get to know the other beings who share that watershed with you. Look them up if you want, but go be with them. Let them teach you, and let the water itself flow through your soul. Find a place where you can gaze at and through the water, breathe it in, let your fingertips ripple through it, immerse your whole being in it for hours and let it flow through your lymph and blood. Or meditate on one glass of water. Make a prayer out of watering your plants. Ask forgiveness of each concrete culvert that used to be a living stream. Ask the water—out loud if you want—what it wants you to know that you don’t know. Listen to what it answers. Feel it flow and swirl in and around you, and notice where the flow is dammed. Sing it songs of praise and thanks. It will bless you a thousand times in return.

All photos by author

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References

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