Journeys of water: Water is sacred

Travelling, tumbling, together

Braided in birdsong

Joy unfurls

Water is Sacred: A Story of Journeys and Cycles.

Water is a story, told in the language of cycles, in the shape of circles, waves, unfurling spirals: swallowing its own tale. It speaks of rising and falling, tumbling, diving, submerging, coming together, pooling, and flowing on. A revolution, a call of constancy and change, of evolution and metamorphosis, mystery and return. Invocations of membranes and edges, exchange and dissolution - chanted over ages in babbling branching streams, braiding in bodies, moving within bodies, bodies and bodies of water: rivers, rainbows, springs, cells, seas, snowflakes, oceans, aquifers, glaciers, clouds, climate cycles.

It spins the telling of seasons, cool and warm, dry and wet, summer and winter, monsoon and drought, desiccation and renewal. It speaks of the tidal love-story with the Moon, and Wind, and fickle balances of salinity, acidity and heat, in the constant kiss of wave on shore.

It emerges in the cycles of living beings: of the eels who grow old in mountain streams and rock pools before voyaging to reproduce in the coral seas, the next generation returning along mysterious paths. The amphibious lives of diverse beings of the rainforest, the unique blue spiny-crayfish who crawl the mossy trails or the singing frogs of the canopy, and all the tiny beings who depend on the ever-moist forest floor and dripping cliff and cave walls. The migrations over life times of the sea turtles who return to those volcanic quartz sand beaches they hatched upon, and the passing annual journeys of whales between rich polar waters and tropical nurseries. The songfilled feathered migrations to the rainforests in the caldera escarpment and the winding wetlands, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and sand islands below. Water's mutant queerness shows in the familial story of the eel, whale, frog, turtle and bird (and you): somehow all children of the same fish.

Water's molecular narrative is a tiny miracle enabling life at the beginning of all stories. Hydrogen fueling the heart of our life-giving star. Ice falling from heaven upon a molten new-born world. A powerful solvent, alchemist's aid, gathering salts and metals into primordial seas that first cradled ancestors. Joyfully it shifts between mist and rain and ice. The nimble electromagnetic and thermal properties of Water have allowed all minute metabolic processes in our world, just as they’ve mediated the great fluid epics of the seas and skies that hold us.

The vast stories of Water are mirrored in every cell and living being. It is blood, cum, amniotic waters, it is in nutrient transportation and protein transcription and waste elimination, and death - it is most of our being. It flows through life in every organic compound: sugar and fat, collagen and wood, venom and silk, dopamine and coal. It is wet membranes that allow exchange, a liminal lining in cells and lungs and gills and guts and the threads that link the forests.

We see it reflected in ourselves. In our psyche and its murky unconscious, in dreams, in the depth of our full range and cycles of emotion, of love and fear and joy and grief, in jealousy and rage and lust and hope, and trauma, and healing. In floating connection and soothing peace, in drowning overwhelm and frozen panic and thirsty desperation. In our capacity to care and to hold as sacred.

It is precious. It is the story of an old friend. Water is treasured across the world and by all beings, calling societies to deep cultures of water reverence: sacred wells and spring tending, river goddesses and waterfall worship, blood-oaths and oasis of sacred peace, baptism and holy water, and wariness for the liminal places at waters’ edge. And it drives civilisations to greed and war, while forgetting its sacred lore imperils us. Some First Nations people, water-defenders, have provoked: “Water is Life” - if we listen to this, as we gather together what wisdom emerges? What work is called for? For ourselves and the Land we are beholden to? How will we tell the story: “Water is Sacred” together in our circle?

The story of Water is told in patient persistence. In the voices of raindrops laughing on basalt, or of slow-flowing glacial ice grinding on granite, groundwater murmuring through limestone, the tears of ancestor after ancestor uninterrupted in the small acts of life, in waves tumbling stones until smooth.

Words by Quiver and Jarrah