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Dear friend,

This is the third issue of my free newsletter. Your feedback is most welcome!

"If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in the water."
- Loren Eisley

"Water is the sacred speech of Nature. It is the intimate conversation, one part of the natural world to the other...Water is the Great Medium that brings together so many different forms."
- David Whyte .

Over a year ago, a very powerful dream focused my attention on the coming scarcity of water on the planet. In my dream, I was living in a South American country and had become part of the resistance movement. Local people had had their water supply diverted by large multinational corporations and they had almost no access to water for growing crops. The resistance movement would go to the streams and dig trenches to divert the water back to their land. They had won a few victories at first. However, troops would then force them, at gunpoint, to restore the water. As a gringo, I often was given this task, which I did with a great heaviness of heart, vowing not to wear my comfortable shoes until the water had been restored to the people. This dream got me started learning about water.

Our bodies are over 70% water, and pure water is our first great need for survival. 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, and some 50,000 people per year die of water-borne disease. The waters of this planet have been gravely polluted by human activity, and water scarcity is becoming a crisis worldwide. Water gives us life, and thus it is profoundly sacred. Yet we treat it as a commodity, we dam it for electricity, we use it to flush our bodily wastes out of sight, we cover over our streams and build roads on top of them, and we allow toxic chemicals to be dumped or washed into them. We have been culturally removed from water. It is managed, controlled, hidden, and destroyed. We have lost our awareness of the preciousness of water. .

"Our sense of the sacred, while it resides deeply in our psyches and is at the basis of our spiritual life, does not inflame our consciousness moment by moment. It needs to be nourished by art and ritual, by the manner and pace of how we live." - Dan Turner, EarthLight Magazine.

Not long after the dream, a friend told me about the work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto. When I first saw his striking images of water, I was deeply moved. (See his website, or for a nice summary, click here.) Emoto photographs frozen droplets of water using a dark field microscope that can produce images of the water's structure. In his book, The Message from Water, he has documented how water's crystalline structure changes dramatically, not just when it is polluted vs. clean, stagnant vs. spring water, but depending on the thoughts, words, music, and energy it is exposed to. Polluted water looks amorphous and diseased, but when it is blessed and thanked, it reverts to a beautiful crystalline shape. Water truly reflects our consciousness and intent. Ken Carey once wrote that when we can clean up the toxic waste in our own minds, it will be a simple matter to clean up the toxins in our rivers.

According to Betsy Damon, the artist who created the Living Water Garden in China,"The care of rivers is a question of the human heart." Having perceived the impending crisis, she decided to devote her life to it, and started the organization called "Keepers of the Waters." The Living Water Garden is on the Fu-Nan River in Chengdu, a city of 9 million people. This park in the shape of a fish (a Chinese symbol of regeneration) cleans and filters the water, while accomplishing multiple objectivesrestoring community, educating, creating beauty. A flow-form system shaped like a bird oxygenates the water. The clean water fountain, a favorite play area for children, is shaped like a chambered nautilus. As Betsy reminds us, we all need to think about where our water comes from, what is in it, how our daily activities affect it, and where it goes after we use it.

Sandra Ingerman, a shamanic practitioner, has written about her experiments with water in Medicine for the Earth. A sample of water contaminated with ammonium hydroxide had its pH reduced from 12 to 9, and simultaneously another sample of water contaminated with nitric acid had its pH raised from 2 to 4, through ceremony. Ingerman points out that every change in pH is a change to the tenth power. This experiment was replicated at least ten times. The ceremony consisted of calling in helping spirits and asking that the water be blessed.

In a book called When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein, a story is told of Leah, a woman from a farming community in California's Central Valley, who was studying spiritual healing. The tap water where she lived tasted and smelled so bad that no one drank it; they relied on bottled water. Leah filled a large jug with tap water and placed it by the door, where she frequently placed her hand on the jug and said a short prayer, asking Holy Spirit to bless the water. One day her brother was very ill, and desperate for water. There was no bottled water in the house, so Leah's niece gave him water from the jug, which he called "the sweetest tasting water I've ever drunk." The next day he was well. It was later verified that just letting water sit in a jug would do nothing to improve its flavor.

Is this far-fetched? Research at San Francisco General Hospital and elsewhere has shown that prayer has measurable healing effects. In the San Francisco study by researcher Randall Byrd, patients who had suffered heart attacks were randomly assigned to two groups; no one (patients, researchers, or medical staff) knew which group was being prayed for. The outcomethose prayed for were 5 times less likely to require antibiotics, 3 times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, and none required mechanical ventilation, compared to 7 in the control group. (For more research on the healing power of prayer, see Healing Words by Larry Dossey, M.D.)

Homeopathy is another example of how water carries energy. Such large dilutions are done that the final product probably does not contain any molecules of the original substance with which the water was treated. Since the remedy has more potency the more highly it is diluted, there has to be a change in the water itself. It has also been shown that certain famous hands-on healers (e.g., Olga Worrall) have the ability to change such properties of water as its surface tension. Perhaps the healer's energies have actually changed the water in the body of the person being healed?

If water is so profoundly affected by our energies, words, and thoughts, then how important it is to do rituals of blessing and healing for our water! Not only our drinking water, but the water in our creeks and bay, which is so full of toxins now. Water is such a universal need that there must be water rituals in practically every spiritual tradition. Of course, the Catholics have been blessing holy water for hundreds of years; Joanna Macy tells me there is a Buddhist water blessing; Anne Marie Sayres, an Ohlone woman, practices water ceremonies.

Rituals can link people from many spiritual traditions, and include restorative action as well (such as, perhaps, planting native plants on stream banks). We know that restoring the Earth and her streams also restores us. These are "acts of practical worship." There are many groups who work to restore creeks and streams, through removing concrete and invasive species and putting native plants in. Dedicated volunteers show up every Saturday morning, even in the rain, to plant natives at Sausal Creek in Oakland. These "friends of creeks" groups might be willing to include a simple water blessing, acknowledging that their work resacralizes our relationship and connection with water. By including elements such as ritual, dance, art, story-telling, and celebration, it is also likely that more people will be attracted to doing restoration work. Children need to learn the sacredness and importance of water, so it is vital that these rituals include and involve them. A wonderful example is the "River of Words" project, in which students of diverse ages write poetry or paint pictures to express their feelings about rivers and streams.

Are you interested in co-creating rituals to honor and bless the water? Drop me an email.

Coming in the next issue: ECUADOR!