Being grateful for the present-ness of water

being-grateful-for-the-present-ness-of-water

Ours is a blue planet, and water defines us, even though we think we do…

We are water ­– at least 60% – and the water in our area has been through us multiple times.

Water is present.

It doesn’t have to decide who it is going to be. It is.

Borrowing from Alan Moore’s proposition for beauty in Do Design: Why Beauty is Key to Everything – perhaps water is a verb.

And as John O’Donohue reminds us, it fluidly adapts to its surroundings:

Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it,

From ‘In Praise of Water’, in Benedictus: A Book of Blessings.

Not ambivalent towards the environment it encounters, water is highly sensitive to changing temperatures holding nothing back in shifting states.

It moves in large oceans and microscopic droplets, responding to the gravitational pull of the moon and the earth.

Water is astonishing, and without it, we are nothing.

So what might we learn?

It is the essence of life – the present-ness of water – and we can step into the flow and be grateful.

RAIN

The blessings of God
Don’t roar through my life
Like rapids so wild
I can’t fight them
They fall as droplets
Soft in their silence
Feathers
Of angels alighting

A dewfall so gentle
A drizzle so fine
There are days
I am deaf
To their descending

Mistakenly naming
My soul as forsaken
Even as I am soaked 

To the skin

Gerard Kelly

With thanks to Chris Matthews for sharing this beautiful poem.

If you can, take time to pause by your ‘water place’ and listen to what it might say to you.

Here is mine, though often I am so slow to listen and learn, yet I am grateful that it receives me back every single time…

Sue

This week

Reflections on water inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dr Wallace J Nichols and being here in the valley this week.