Tag Archives: Starhawk

All the Water Is One Water

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In honor of World Water Day, I offer this excerpt from a chapter in my book, Finding Our Way Home: A Spiritual Journey into Earth Community.  I will share further excerpts during the next few days.  This chapter is entitled, “All the Water Is One Water.”

Water BottleOne summer several years ago, I attended a two-week Earth Activist Training, which combined a Permaculture Design Course with practice in magical and political work on behalf of the earth. We began with a water ritual. We brought water from the places we lived or the places we may have traveled to pour into one container. At the end, each person took some of the water, and we brought it home with us. One of the teachers for the training was feminist witch and eco-activist Starhawk, whose writings had been important for me earlier in my spiritual journey. She had begun collecting water in this way many years ago. She brought water back from her travels around the world, and asked her friends to bring back water when they went to far off places. They brought water from the sacred Ganges River in India, and from the great Nile River in Egypt; they even brought melted ice from Antarctica. After a while, they had water from every continent.

When you pour it into one container, all of the water mixes together, and every drop has some of the molecules of water from every place. So if you take a small bottle of water out, you have the waters from many places in one bottle. Each time you have a water ritual, you add some water from the bottle you saved from the previous ritual. In that way, each ritual, each small bottle, contain the waters from all over the world.

Why would we want to have a small bottle of waters from everywhere in the world? For me, first of all, it is one more way to make tangible the sacredness of water. All life comes from water, and needs water to survive. Water moves through the whole ecosystem, nurturing and transforming life as it moves. It rises from the ocean in evaporation, forming clouds in the sky, and, blown by the winds, it returns to the land in the form of rain or snow. This precipitation falls into the soil, and gathers in streams and aquifers. In the midst of this journey, it also travels through the bodies of every living thing.

Margy and I have a bird bath outside our back door. Many kinds of birds come to drink the water we keep filled there, but we’ve also seen squirrels, chipmunks, and bees stop to drink. Every being needs water: insects, birds, mammals, fish, humans. Water also rises up into the stems of plants and the trunks of trees. But none of the water is isolated from the rest—even our own bodies are part of the watershed. We drink in the water, it moves through our blood, and permeates all of our cells, and then we sweat it out or pee it out. Sometimes we weep with wet salty tears. The water goes back to the air or the earth and continues in streams and rivers on its way to the ocean. The cycle keeps going round and round.

All the water on earth is really one water, continuously flowing through the biosphere. Even if we get water from our kitchen tap, that water has been around the world on its journey. All water is connected, and connects all of life.

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Meandering Toward Wholeness

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If I can remember to be thankful about water, then I have the capacity to take action on its behalf as well. There are many people mobilizing on behalf of clean water. Thankfulness can be the beginning of restoring our relationship with water. And then the water itself will guide us into the next steps on the journey.

Stream DSC02225The path forward is never a straight line. I find hope in that. A river or stream meanders on its way to the sea. Starhawk explains that because of the friction of the river bed, the water on the bottom of the river moves more slowly than the water on the top. So it creates a spiraling current that wears down one bank and deposits sediment on the other, and then vice versa, as it move around and around in sweeping curves.1 Just so, our journey into a new relationship with all life on earth will meander—I imagine in this case, there is more movement at the bottom of our culture, while the top is going much slower. But since we are all connected, movement in any segment has a ripple effect on the whole.

For me, hope also comes with the choice to keeping taking steps, even small steps, in the direction of living in balance with the rest of our interdependent web. To keep meandering in the direction of wholeness. To keep learning from our elder siblings on this planet—learning from the plants, and animals, the soil and the seasons.

 

Photo by Margy Dowzer

Photo by Margy Dowzer

One summer, Margy and I purchased two rain barrels, as one step toward more conscious participation in the great cycle of water. We are collecting the rain-water that runs off our garage roof, for use in watering the blueberry bushes I planted in our front yard. We are learning about how high off the ground the barrels need to be, in order for gravity to pull the water all the way to the plants. We are learning that water in a rain barrel heats up rather quickly in the hot summer sun. We are learning how quickly a rainstorm can fill two fifty gallon barrels.

It is a very small step, especially here in our comparatively water abundant climate in Maine. No matter. Some people are taking bigger steps, and that gives me hope too. For example, some people are designing gray water systems that take the water from washing and showering and use it for the garden. Others are restoring rivers and lakes that once were declared dead.

All the earth is one earth. All the water is one water. We all belong to this great cycle of life. Each creative step forward will ripple out into a spiral momentum toward greater balance. I feel hopeful that so many human beings are embracing these deep truths and changing the way we imagine our futures.

All the Water Is One Water

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Earth_high_def_1024Earth is a water planet. …Between earth and earth’s atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself.
                                                                                                   Linda Hogan

It is a tradition in my congregation that every September we gather ourselves together with a water ritual. We bring water from the places we love, the places we may have traveled, to pour into one container. At the end, each person takes some of the water, and we bring it home with us.

One summer, I attended a similar ritual with Starhawk, at the beginning of an Earth Activist Training. Starhawk began collecting water many years ago. She brought water back from her travels around the world, and asked her friends to bring back water when they went to far off places. They poured all these waters into one big container. Over time, people brought water from the sacred Ganges River in India, and from the great Nile River in Egypt; even melted ice from Antarctica. After a while, they had waters from every continent.

When you pour it in one container, all of the water mixes together, and every drop has some of the molecules of water from every place. So if you take a small bottle of water out, you have the waters from many places in one bottle. Each time you have a water ritual, you add some water from the bottle you saved from the previous ritual. In that way, each ritual, each small bottle, contain the waters from all over the world.

Why would we want to have a small bottle of waters from everywhere in the world? For me, it is a reminder that water is sacred–without water there would be no life at all. It is also a reminder that we need to take care of the waters of the world. All water is connected, and the same water recycles itself through the whole earth. All the waters on earth are really one water. So even if we get water from our kitchen tap, that water has been around the world on its journey

Linda Hogan reminds us,

It has lived beneath the lights of fireflies in bayous at night when mist laid itself around cypress trunks. It has held sea turtles in its rocking arms. …It reminds us that we are water people. Our salt bodies, like the great round of ocean, are pulled and held by the moon. We are creatures that belong here. This world is in our blood and bones, and our blood and bones are the earth.

Linda Hogan quotes are from Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, pp. 99, 106, 108.

What is worthy of our worship?

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If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart, what would you worship there?

The Buddhist teacher, the Dalai Lama, has said, “My religion is very simple. My religion is Kindness.” In the temple of his heart, he has chosen kindness to value, he has chosen kindness to which to commit his life. He has tried to live with kindness, even when the Chinese government took over his homeland of Tibet, and he went to live in exile. When he could no longer go to the beautiful temples of his childhood, he opened the temple of his heart, and chose kindness and compassion for all people.

People worship different things within the temple of their hearts. It is a very personal choice, to find what is worthy of your worship.

The pagan writer and teacher, Starhawk, calls herself a dirt-worshiper. She points to the soil beneath our feet, and reminds us that all of our food comes from that soil. The soil is the place of Life. So it becomes the most valuable thing in the temple of her heart. She gardens in the soil, and replenishes it with compost. She creates ritual to worship the earth, and celebrate all the seasons of the earth—fall, winter, spring and summer. She tries to stop the companies that are damaging the soil by using too much fertilizer or cutting down the forests. Sometimes she even goes to jail. She is really committed to the earth and to the soil. It is at the center of her heart and her life.

Photo by Margy Dowzer

Photo by Margy Dowzer

Take some time to ponder it.

What do you hold in the center of your heart?
What would you be willing to fight for, to die for?
Is your heart filled with junk?
Or something worthy of your commitment?
When you clean up everything, what stays in the room?
What is the thing you would never throw away?
What helps you keep your balance when trouble comes or storms rock your world?
What helps you connect with the larger reality of which we are a part?

Do You Believe in Rocks?

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Beach RockThe word spirituality comes from the Latin root spirare, which means to breathe. When we breathe, we are alive. We are in relationship, physically, to the world around us, to all other breathers of air: all the human beings, all the animals and the birds, all the trees and the plants. It is first of all a very material, chemical exchange. Breathing is life shared among many beings. When we stop breathing, we die. Breathing might be called the first prayer. Spirituality is first of all about what breathes us into life, what inspires us.

But this word spirituality also comes with a lot of baggage. It has been associated with dogma and religious doctrine. It has been understood as separate from the earth and the body and our physical reality, and also declared more important than our physical reality. Some people have been repelled by the idea of spirituality because they associate it with the irrational and the supernatural, something that requires accepting beliefs that don’t make sense, that don’t fit the facts.

However, spirituality doesn’t have to carry all that baggage. In fact, it may be critical to our lives that we unpack that baggage and find a definition of spirituality that can breathe again. And here is one place to start: spirituality is not about our beliefs, but about our experience. Spirituality is our experience of the larger reality of which we are a part. Spirituality is our experience of connection—our connection to this living earth and all its creatures, our connection to other people, our connection to all that is mysterious and beautiful at the heart of life.

Spirituality is like breathing. Just as the invisible air enters our lungs and brings oxygen to each cell, so spirituality—as experience—brings the outer reality that is so much bigger than we are into the inner feeling of it. Each person’s inner experience may be different from that of their neighbor. When we emphasize experience rather than require certain beliefs, our religious communities can include spiritualities as different from each other as Pagan and Atheist, Christian and Jew. Each person can follow a path that fits their own experience of reality. We are not asked to believe in a particular spirituality, but to be open to the possibility that people’s spiritual experiences have validity, even if they are different from our own.

Now, some might ask, “How can atheists have spirituality?” If we understand spirituality as our experience of the larger reality, then atheists have spirituality when they experience, in their own meaningful way, that larger reality of which we all are a part. Perhaps that experience is mediated by science or skepticism or meditation. That’s fine. Spirituality does not require a belief in God or Goddess or heaven or hell or any of the ideas that have become associated with spirituality. It is not about belief, but about experience.

Pagan writer, Starhawk, describes this distinction between beliefs and experience in regard to her experience of the Goddess. She says:

People often ask me if I believe in the Goddess. I reply, ‘Do you believe in rocks?’ …The phrase ‘believe in’ itself implies that we cannot know the Goddess, that she is somehow intangible, incomprehensible. But we do not believe in rocks—we may see them, touch them, dig them out of our gardens, or stop small children from throwing them at each other. We know them, we connect with them. In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess—we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.

Starhawk, The Spiral Dance