The Sacredness of Water

I'm sort of obsessed by water and have been for well over a decade. Water for me is sacred because water is essential to life. Without breathable air and water, this planet would die. It makes up about 60% of the human body which makes us mostly water beings. I'm not sure what the percentage is for other species but it's probably going to be quite high. None of us here on this Earth can survive without water although some incredible life can remain dormant for long periods, years even, such as the African Lungfish although it too requires water to survive. 

Looking at our blue planet from space, it is clear that this is mainly a planet of water. When the Voyager 1 exploration spacecraft was just about to leave the Solar System for good, the first manmade object to do so ever, (and something that still brings a lump to my throat), 3.7 billion miles away, the mission managers, acting on a request by the eminent scientist Carl Sagan, were asked to turn the craft's cameras around for one last time and take a photograph of Earth. The 'pale blue dot', a term coined by Sagan and subsequently turned into a book of the same name was an iconic picture of this tiny blue dot hanging in the huge vastness of empty space, like a tiny jewel in the dust. It showed us just how precious and unique our world is, the blue being the reflection of the water. And we hang in a balance in a zone called the 'Goldilocks Zone' , where we are at just the right distance from the Sun for our water not to freeze or evaporate but to remain in largely liquid form, bar the poles of course. Since we have an atmosphere, our water can't go anywhere and remains pretty much at the same volume as when the dinosaurs first roamed the Earth and before. 

When we search for life on other planets, we always look for sources or evidence of water. We know that where there is or was water, there was, is or might be life in some form or another. It can also inspire space travel since spaceships can't carry that much water. We always have to think about how we are going to survive once we get there, wherever that is. 

Just how did water come to this planet in the first place? It is an abiding mystery. Scientific opinion usually focuses on comets and asteroids as the water bringers smashing into the Earth in its earliest days. These celestial nomads usually harbour large quantities of ice, they are like dirty snowballs. And the question begs to be asked: how did water get onto the comets? All the comets we know of exist only within the boundaries of our solar system, make periodic appearances and fly bys of the Sun sometimes not returning for thousands of years. Were comets part of some huge watery planets that disintegrated many, many aeons ago? The whole story of water and the formation of the universe are intertwined and I guess something that we will never know for sure. How did that combination of elements of all the possible combinations come to be the one that would allow the universe to observe itself? So simple, just two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen, as stable a compound as there is and has ever been. It fascinates me. It is something we take for granted as we fill the kettle or have a shower yet it is so essential. It is something of the divine and its very essence sacred.

But back to Earth. I hear stories all the time - and have witnessed it myself - of how we're polluting this most precious, planet defining substance. The Yamuna River in India, that flows or rather bubbles its way past the Taj Mahal is a case in point. Huge crests of foam make it look like a gigantic bubble bath. The banks of the river are littered with plastic and other garbage. There are thousands of rivers around the world that are the same but obviously it's not just rivers. Lakes, ponds, marshes, seas and oceans, all are full of our toxic rubbish. It is an international disgrace. This garbage, which continues to proliferate day in, day out, is choking the life out of the streams, rivers and seas but it is out of sight and largely out of mind. As long as the beaches have sand and we can get water out of the tap or from plastic bottles we're alright. But we're not. Not really. There is something deeper at work here, something unacknowledged. We are not only harming our world, we are harming ourselves, becoming alien to our planet and to what gives it life. It is as if we are working against some divinity inside ourselves, as if we have forgotten our deep essence and connection to this world.

It is no wonder that we are destroying our environment and carry on regardless when we all experience a sort of collective cognitive dissonance, myself included. We have given power to an unfeeling presence, one that is in thrall to money. This is no idle conspiracy theory either. There simply is no political will to do anything about all the toxicity issues we are facing or if there is, it is minimal and paying only lip service to it, i.e. talking about it - the service of lips! Empty gestures, words of no meaning and so on. It is business as usual because there is no imagination in the corridors of power, or precious little that I can see. I know there are people out there who think and feel like I do and who do far more than me and my blog. Environmental protectors are the warriors of our age. I can't name them all but I remember so clearly the people that stood against the Dakota Access Pipeline a few years ago and at Standing Rock. This, among other things, was about water and the frightening potential of poisoning the rivers and a lake under which the oil pipeline from the Bakken oil fields was projected to run. Initially stopped, it was started again and completed in the Trump era. Many people were arrested and injured in trying to block its progress but it went ahead anyway and once again corporate power and greed trumped community, sacredness, and life. 

Anyone who has ever studied oil pipelines, knows that they can and do leak despite all the safety assessments. Once oil gets into water, it's game over for the life that the water brings until such time as it dissipates or is cleaned up which can take a very long time and enormous effort, sometimes even using surfactants that add another chemical to the water. Look at what happened when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and 40 million barrels of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. That's six and a half billion litres, more or less. Imagine that amount of water bottles stretching into the distance. It is almost unimaginable. It was the biggest oil spill in human history and the devastation and after effects 11 years later can still be seen and felt. And there are so many more. Carelessness, greed, apathy, arrogance all contribute and we must all bear this shadow because these disasters are not just the corporation's fault. It is our reliance on them, the corporations, to provide all the commodities and energies we demand that drives this insane treadmill and has given them so much power. Once again, it is a lack of imagination that got us here and it was due to our own apathy that this happened. 

This of course is a much, much larger subject than this blog post can even begin to cover in its thousand words or so. I can't describe, let alone research this whole subject of environmental degradation, especially that of water, and all the heroes and villains and how these two can be interchangeable because it is not my intention to point at individuals or to blame. Much as I would like to! There may well be demonic forces at work in this world, I don't know for sure, but the evidence is that there is something that stops us remembering the sacredness of life and of water to its detriment. There is a force that is not focused on life but on power, absolute power. It ignores all obstacles and pours its toxic brews over the soil, which leach into the water. It drills and mines regardless of harm to the Earth. It processes what it mines and drills for and creates objects that it turns into money and that money turns into power. That's the simplified version anyway! This power has become, or maybe always was, utterly corrupt. It has no end in sight other than its own satiation. It is not life-affirming in any shape or form. 

How did we allow things to get to this point? Modern life has become complicated and it seems this complexity grows exponentially and with that complexity comes the difficulty in finding our way back to a simpler, truer way of being where we are in connection with nature because, after all, we are nature. We grew from the earth, that stuff below our feet, like magical mobile plants, not exactly photosynthesising, but doing a pretty good version of a not too dissimilar process. As in nature, the more complex organisms become, the more they are prone to collapse in on themselves and that is what we are witnessing now. Most people's lives in the so called First World countries are complicated to distraction. If you're one of these people, just think of all the processes involved that allow you to live like you do. The morning coffee or tea came from somewhere else, usually some hillside or mountain in a warmer climate, the seeds for the plants that provided the beans came from somewhere else too, all of these processes involved energy, organisation, money, transport and all of these things had to be mined, drilled, processed, planned, manned and so on. That is just your coffee! So add in all the interactions of all the other things that you personally have to attend to or experience during a normal day and all the people, processes and materials they involve. It's huge. This is how complicated our societies are and how each part of the jigsaw relies on each other part. We've created a web of complexity that is mind-boggling. It's like a global set of dominos because if one part of it should fail, it will have consequences further down the line. 

Now this post is meant to be about water but the subject has been extrapolated to include space, pollution, corporate greed and modern life. See how it infiltrates into the global unconscious? It is everywhere but I want to close by mentioning my personal journey with water over the past few years. I don't know exactly when it was but at some point in the last fifteen or twenty years, I became more conscious of the water I drank. It was probably something to do with the taste of ordinary tap water combined with a bit of knowledge about what the water companies were treating it with and a spiritual awakening inside myself. After trying water filters, I started buying mineral water and then I started collecting water from springs using the bottles I'd bought from the shop in the first place. I went to Glastonbury and the White Spring and then someone told me about a spring on the busy A39 near Coxley and finally I heard about the spring at Hawkwood College, just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire, that arises beneath a huge, elegant elder statesman-like Sycamore tree. Since then, I have always tried to have the freshest and cleanest water I can get. When I lived in Portugal, I had water straight from the ground piped into my house. Portugal is a country where you often find springs in or near villages, especially in the mountains and some of these springs are beautiful places to visit. Many farms in remoter places will have their own 'water mine' where people have dug into the side of hills and mountains looking for a source. It occurred to me England too has many many springs but so many of them now seem to be lost or on private inaccessible land. When I lived just outside Bristol, not far from the airport but far enough for it still be a place of quiet and beauty, there was a spring right beside the little lane which was said to cure eye problems. However, it was almost lost in the vegetation and sometimes quite difficult to find. I believe we sourced some for my then wife's mother who had some eye problems but I forget whether it worked or not. 

Spring water has long been said to have special healing properties, both physical and emotional. Even spiritual. Now I live in the south of England once more, I am determined to find my closest springs and start collecting this precious water again. In fact, I have already found such a place and I am hoping that the people that own the land allow me to collect this water. My obsession led to the recent purchase of a number of books on the subject, mostly about Holy Wells. These places that were once pagan sites but were subsumed into the Christian faith and dedicated to a variety of ancient saints, many of whom I have never heard of, such was the early beatification process. Well known place names still attest to these sites - St Albans is one such place. It seems, somehow, that the natural clean pure water that flows under our hills and mountains and through our valleys is connected to our disassociation with our land and nature because we don't have free and easy access to it. Very few people actually collect spring water. 

Most people in this country, England, get their water either from the tap or from a plastic bottle from the shop. It is the consumerist version of getting water from a spring, paying for what is essentially your inherent right as a being of water. If we brought all the springs back to life, would there be enough to go around? Who knows. In cities such as London and even bigger cities around the world such as Sao Paulo and Mexico City, it is probably a resounding 'no'. These places are just too crowded to provide spring water for all the inhabitants. Should we all live in much smaller communities? I would like to think that this would be better for everyone, more healthy, but it is also highly unlikely and impractical. Water can still be provided to large numbers of people in densely populated areas but must it be treated the way it is? Adding chemicals to it to kill off bacteria and microbes effectively deadens water. I understand why it is done but can't help but notice that dead water with no life in it, and water is a living thing, doesn't bring aliveness to the people that drink it. Keeping it in static containers and in straight pipes doesn't help either. Water needs to flow. 

Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian forester living in the last century who died in 1958,  had a particular gift for observing nature. He saw that the water in streams didn't flow in a straight line, it turned and twisted, like the braiding of a rope. It was a vortex, the natural way that water moved. As a result of his observations, he invented a number of devices designed to bring back the living quality of water. If these could somehow be part of a design for an urban water system, it could bring enormous health benefits to people. I have already mentioned how we are water beings. We can't help but be influenced by the Moon cycles, just like the seas and oceans. It is a subtle thing but to lesser or greater degrees, we feel this cycle too and it manifests in different ways such as swings in energy, mood, and creativity. Imagine how that would feel if we were actually ingesting living water?     

After a recent fasting retreat, I went to a place in Devon, near Taunton, to visit a friend of a friend of mine. The house we visited was owned by a couple and the man had once been a water engineer working out in the Far East. He was passionate about the subject of water and we got to talking about water and all its wonderful applications and then he mentioned that he had his own spring source, which he could have bottled and sold but it was all too much as he had a huge house to maintain. I tasted this water and took some away with me in bottles. It was sweet water, constantly flowing, fresh and alive. I could sense its sacred quality and I use that word 'sacred' unashamedly. What do I mean by sacred? Isn't everything sacred? I mean it is of the divine, of the 'other', an inexplicable mystery that brought life to this little rock of ours. Clearly it is up to each one of us to put our focus and gratitude on whatever we think deserves it but for me I wish to honour this source of life. To that end, I wish to start a project to bring back the lost wells of this land, wherever they may be, and to think about ways in which to get living water to all the people living in cities. Springs used to be places of reverence. What if we brought back that reverence, beautified the wells, made them special, planted fragrant flowers, herbs and trees around them? Maybe it would lead to more gratitude in the world, more peace and harmony and greater consciousness. We can't expect the world to change overnight but just the first steps may lead to something truly wonderful. What are we waiting for?

Be well.