Reflections on Water
featured image | r. fabian
Editor’s note: Water is a keeper of secrets, a bearer of memory, and a patient teacher. Here, writers gather to listen—and to offer poems and meditations shaped by the slow intelligence of water. Together, they invite a quieter knowing, one that flows beneath language and returns us to the source.
Jane Lockhart
I simply would not be able to write this essay, without the presence of Water.
Water all around me and water within me, as Me.
I would like to take this moment, to call upon Water, to write this together to guide these tapping fingers.
Water pauses.
At first breath, we invite your participation.
To breathe open our hearts and ignite the fire of imagination in our minds.
Water moving and breathing in us.
There is a Water that flows down from Heaven
to Cleanse the world of Sin by Grace Divine
At last, its whole stock spent
its virtue gone,
Dark with pollution not its own, it speeds
Back to the Fountain of all purities,
Whence, freshly bathed, earthward it sweeps again,
Trailing a Robe of glory
Bright and Pure
This Water is the Spirit of Saints,
Which ever sheds, until itself is beggared,
God’s balm on the sick soul: and then returns
To Him Who made the purest Light of Heaven.
– Rumi
Many moons have passed since I first felt Water’s invitation in my heart. I could not possibly know at that moment where it might take me. I never imagined it would lead me here.. Guided by the light of my teacher, Lllewellyn Vaughan-Lee and other friends, we hosted a screening of a film by the Kogi of Columbia, called Aluna, in late 2013.
The Kogi hold deep meaning for me. My daughter’s father was with them the night she was born—her birth echoed in the murmuration of starlings flying above the river. At that time, I was a midwife. We celebrated water in many ways—its fertility, its arrival, its trickling guidance. In magical lore, a baby born with a caul was seen as especially blessed. The cauldron of Life itself is made of water.
Now as a student of homeopathy, I wonder at the power of water holding the embryo of materia medica. I remember learning that the water we first live in—the amniotic fluid—is nearly identical in makeup to the ocean, forming just roughly twelve days after conception.
Aluna, is a film designed to instruct us, to remind us in seeing beyond separation. Just like the mother feels that first stirring of Life unfolding. Have we forgotten so much? The film’s intent was to remind us that the most vital gift of our Planet, our Mother, is water, and thus perhaps the most important to protect now.
“If nothing else, work with water” was the message I heard.
It is said, Earth’s water is akin to the blood of the mother. It moves through her, at best, in perfect balance, protecting and nourishing and fertilizing all Life. Cutting edge science in biology now considers the first biomolecules of life that assembled, may have derived from tiny droplets of water.
My search has been one of wonder—an inquiry into the relationship between water, humanity, and life on Earth. Across the many religions and worldviews I’ve been blessed to explore, each holds its own reverent expression of water: as sacred source, hidden messenger, secret alchemy, biological creator, and living spirit.
“Who are you?” I would whisper, as I traveled the world tracing rivers from their source to their mouth—an awareness gifted to me by the Kogi, who taught that this journey is vital to the river’s wellbeing. Like a birthing woman discovering her voice and innate strength, I slowly came to see that openness in each carries a fullness—a direction, a labor, a path toward fruition. Together they create a unity of openness.
A friend once walked our local river, reimagining its original course—the way it once snaked and wove through the land. I have no doubt that Water’s universal story, echoing deep within us, is calling out to many now, in countless and mysterious ways.
Back in 2014, we made offering’s, took pictures, exhibitions and film shows. Yet Water had not finished with me. If anything it had just begun reviving me as its pulse within, asking for more.
Slowly, guided by this deep longing, I began gathering water samples—springs, wells, valleys, lakes, rivers, oceans, snow, puddles, taps, raindrops—witnessing Water come forward in my awareness. At first each was named and labelled until one day, the labels fell away—the same water in me, is in you…the same water in the river there, named by place, is the very same water of this place.
Water continued to teach me, pulling me closer, to observe her patterns. I say her, yet water is of no gender. Not that I know of. Water never revealed a gender to me. “Look here,” she would say, swirling around a boulder, before entering through a smaller crevice. Change, change the way you are, I am you. Like an ancient rock face, water slowly eroded my hardened core.
One dreaming night, Water spoke to me: Now you have your purpose at hand. You will bring me to light.
How? I asked.
Be patient. Listen, ask, and follow me.
I saw many people working in restorative ways to regenerate water on Earth—but that wasn’t the instruction I received.
Water was moving through me not to repair, but to create.
To reveal.
To project.
To simply…Be.
We started taking photographs of the samples. I would send them to my friend Anna and she would design and picture. The first photograph was an emergence of Water as a universe in itself! Each image is distinct. We continue to work with them. They defy logic—just as Water defies many known laws of physics and gravity.
Water, I cry out, as my hands type. Tell them, Water says, what today was for us.
The morning was still young—or perhaps old, by the measure of darkness.
My four-legged companion and I stepped out from the warmth of shelter into the cold that comes just before dawn.
For the first time, I opened the gate… and paused.
Which way? I asked. Toward the mountain? I wondered.
No, the echo answered.
Follow the curve of the land to the stream.
We moved slowly, careful not to wake the sleeping cows, and passed through another gate, where something unseen compelled me—to stop.
Water was mist, Mist is Water. Water was rising up out of the stream and pond. Lifting up, arising, slowly and stealthily like a long and deep breath. The stars were here with us, myriad water lights in the sky. Water was changing its form. The skies above, the streams below were inseparable. The Water was everywhere, now alive where once known only by the name mist.
Some moments later, on the call of a bird we began to walk back home. What a beautiful gift I mused, what a joy, not knowing what was to come. This is the truth from Water shared with me, each step is unknown and comes in its time. As we followed the old stone wall along the edges of the mountain and loch, up the slight inclination of the hill, the valley below had vanished, nothing remained but mist.
How many times had I stood in awe of mists?
And yet—today was different.
There was a subtle shift as the mist began to move uphill, sweeping across the land, over the hill I had once thought to climb, and now—into the very fields where we stood.
It rose steadily,
sweeping out memory,
sweeping out what was hidden,
sweeping out the polluted.
It moved effortlessly, like a Great Force of Love.
Oh, this beauty.
Never had I witnessed anything like it. There was no question now, no doubt left in me—of what Water is.
I returned home with the spring of blue sky optimism. Yet I felt different. I couldn’t walk on two legs so well. Like a collapsing star, I sunk into the black hole of my armchair. Almost immediately, a force took hold of me, drawing me inward. There was nothing to do. The same mist was inside me, sweeping out the pollution, the contaminants. Love, a force of Love as Water is me. The same mist upon the Ocean, the River, the Pond. Tears fell down my face as Love squeezed out the darkness in me.
Just a few months ago, I asked Water, “Where next?”
I have no memory of how, within the mycelial web of computers, I was led to a ‘young elder’ in Hawai‘i—one who so generously shared a a living pattern or original design, called Ulu, once transmitted only through oral tradition. He is of that place—Hawai‘i—and can trace his ancestry farther back than I can imagine.
He spoke with quiet authority, saying:
Water was once known for its truth. It came from the stars, and helped design and create life on Earth—through atmosphere.
When my Hawaiian friend later asked, When the first Creators were among us, what do you think they did after they created water?
I held my breath. And to the quiet amazement of my heart, he answered with such eloquence and poetry:
They became the Waters.
Immutable. Inseparable from Life.
Aloha Mā, in the language of Hawai‘i, translates as self-reflecting love.
Looking back, to the Women’s Circle I was honored to be part of—held by Jacqui Crovetto in Glastonbury—I remember hearing a memory offered like a thread: We dreamed ourselves into this time. We are the Original Dreamers.
Water, I ask, shall I send this now?
It is International Women’s Day. We could write so much more—and yet, I feel I have said enough.
“Like mist itself, we cannot always see what lies ahead, yet we know we are here for our original purpose: Love.
Ahhh, ahhh—may all discover their unique Song of Love,” Water whispers in the setting sun.
And so, it never ends—this journey of life—as gentle snow begins to fall here in the borders of Scotland.
Jane Lockhart is a former Independent Natural Birth Midwife and is currently studying Classical Homeopathy. She is a wanderer, currently on the Scottish Borders called to the many distant shores of explorative life through Water and is Founder of a Collaborative art project called JAAN, designing Life with Water as Oracle. She is a Sufi practitioner and spent several years in India at Arunachala Holy Mountain. She has two wonderful grown children, Oliver and Eva. She can be reached at janelockhart33@gmail.com.
References :
A Woman’s Circle with Jacqui Crovetto
Aluna – An Ecological Warning by the Kogi People
The River – an exploration of a disconnected river: the Brue and the Axe in Somerset
Veda Austin
The Fourth Phase of Water: Dr. Gerald Pollack at TEDxGuelphU
The Building Blocks of Life May Have Formed in Primordial Sea Spray
Pohala | Esoteric Hawaiian Botanical Medicine
Rumi poem
Special Mention to Adam Reiser for his amazing contribution collecting water samples.
Sheersty Stanton
Showerhead
Do cumulus tides in the great cerebral watershed fear Babel?
the gentle, muffled push of the moon
their own downward ballooning individualism / blurted
in a billion splintered tongues to quench the earth?
It’s ambition’s turn to be wrung out between opposing fronts
with the permission to sputter
fall apart and drain to the stream of consciousness /
whole again
Constance Clark
Mirrors of the Overstory
A wall of thick waxed leaves, each one elliptical and slender,
a thousand evergreen tongues stuck into the receiving air
from layered cherry laurel or rhododendron branches.
The leaves accept all precipitation, multiply and shine outward—
mirrors of the overstory, of deer and darting wings,
human passersby, God. The leaves endure, upright
evergreen members of woods and stationary thickets, this
hedge right on my pathway, part of the whole glass world.
In summer, lower growth contends black beetles
snipping holes clear though live plant tissue, bite by bite—
carved circles of light the size of cut gemstones.
Sun’s glint and flash rush new access through them.
Upper leaves and the tight glabrous buds attached
to their stems are untouched by mandibles, remain whole
and shiny, and later are rocked by the eastern breezes that bring
rain’s polish to every one. As I stay there, wet feet,
tied back hair, the rain on my bare skin reflects back green.
Bilateral Impression
I often think there’s another dimension writhing
in the hazy plumes off the granular beach horizon—
one where souls reside in incessant transparency.
They mingle and vibe inside the plumes and divine
pastel hues to spread at the tops of the moving florets.
Do Good and Evil spar there, each balancing the other’s
movement outward – a bloody gunshot, a good deed –
invisible, disembodied, conceiving the world?
Does either side dominate though we like to think so?
The rising tide slides in organizing my feet and body
in a pool of reality; the daydream lingers but the plumes
spread the sky into a lattice of distorted crisscrosses—
thin clouds that seem to float like ghosts and angels.
Someone is taking a life. Someone is making love.
The Moon understands—there isn’t just one way to be
in this world: scratchy crab holes are everywhere,
pipers and gulls, too. I join the Moon under the influence
of Earth and we conceive the tides beneath us
and they become our incomprehensible language
of violence and mercy beyond our control.
Water Sound Healing
This sound healing, infused with the gentle movement of water, was created to bring you closer to your natural state of flow, cleansing dense energy, releasing stress and strain, and allowing your emotions to move freely. The singing in this video is purely intuitive, a channelled sound healing activation, alongside an original Handpan piece. Blessings, Chantress Seba Gemini and Finn, I and I (derived from YouTube)
Daniel Skach-Mills
In the Quiet Hour
when sleep
is the bird
with folded wings
and snow
whispers to the world
one white word
how clearly dawn’s
winter-wide bell rings us
as the single sound
we all once were
before flurry
before names
About the Poets
Sheersty Stanton, MS, native to Kansas, aspires to spark the transformation that is not only possible but paramount within systems of all levels today – the personal, communal, and global. Her vocational aim is to integrate between ideologies, and between humanity, nature, and the Sacred, through capacity-building and creative works.
Constance Clark is a retired high school literature teacher, former business owner, and former national trade magazine editor. She recently published the poem “Sticks & Stones” in the Moonstone Press Sylvia Plath Remembrance collection. She lives in central New Jersey, not far from her three children and two exuberant grandchildren, where she writes and runs every day.Constance Clark is a writer and retired teacher from central NJ. Her poems have appeared in Litbreak Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, anthologies, and elsewhere. She is currently writing her first collection of poems focused on the notice of nature that will include a long eco-aesthetic poem on the 72 Japanese microseasons.
Daniel Skach-Mills has been published in Sojourners, Soul Forte, The Christian Science Monitor, Sufi, and Open Spaces. His book, The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems was a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist. In 2018, The Beyond Within: The Downtown Dao of Lan Su Chinese Garden was a finalist in The Body, Mind, Spirit Book Awards, and The National Indie Excellence Awards. A former Trappist monk, Daniel lives in Portland, Oregon, where he served fifteen years as a docent for Lan Su Chinese Garden.
