Water is the vital source. Its the heart and everything that circulates. It moves endlessly yet it’s eddies and patterns remain constant. There is water everywhere here. Springing and welling up from deep within the hills and mountains. Oceans surround.

It is the quality of the water in the bay that I first experience and am struck by. It’s clarity and it’s softness. The beauty of light refracting and reflecting through water astounds me so nearly every day I head to the bay to watch the patterns on the water. I experience the quality of the water as a reflection of all that surrounds. I’m fascinated by the shapes of the ripples, waves and motion – so much movement, in so many directions, created by so many forces, all happening at once (it is all one). I remember that a drop of water in the ocean remains itself in the same position, it’s not carried away, but remains through this motion. Easily ceding motion on one plane. All that is, and all that works upon it simply passes over / through. There is deep beauty and magic in the reveal of ‘invisible’ workings.

My reflections on water expand after it first rains while I’m here. I walk after the rains in Wellington, following a path I’ve followed before, the streams enlivened and multiplied. I note:

Everywhere is bleeding water
It springs from under the earth
Rises, bubbling through the
bitumen and asphalt

An abundance pushes through
moves down stream
Collecting, amassing, gaining
momentum and gravity
Slowing, spreading
languishing in holding pools,
it’s path destroyed

Too much to be contained
rises like a fountain
and recreates its way

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a little time outside of the city, dwelling on a beautiful farm and it’s wild places/powerful reserves. Here, for the first time in my life I sat by a hill and listened to the sound of water emerging drop by drop from a hillside. It is one of the most precious and delicate things I have ever heard. I don’t try to record it. We are in the transition to spring, and true to it’s name life springs into being, blossoms from hard exteriors everywhere around. I open with it, propelled along in my journey by the natural forces, so very vital and present on this land. In these streams I see the patterns of life, double helix’s and spirals abound in its flow. Weaving its way down. Tumbling and turning in on itself, reviving as it goes.

As I move through my time here it’s the abundance of vital water that resonants through my being and fills my cup. I wrote a little last time about the harshness of Australia and my internal landscape. The contrast has become even starker now; between the drought at home, people killing their live.stock (itself holding new spring life on the cusp of blooming) for compassion, unable to keep the struggle going without the arrival of this precious (re)source and the feeling I get here – of life constantly unfolding, unfurling out over the top of itself in beautiful curved messes. Here I watch lambs being born, flowers blooming and ferns eternally emanating outwards.

Watching Australian politics, I despair for our humanity (Nauru, continuing genocide of the profound culture of Aboriginal ‘Australia’, fostered racism, etc etc) Is it the lack of water that leads to this aggressive, loveless, fearful, defensive mode of being? What happens to the world as access to this (re)source dries up, or is increasingly polluted by large heartless companies? What kind of a world will we live to see? (I’ve had dreams of the ‘start’ of the ‘end’)