Little by little, drop by drop, I am coming to terms with my desire to write about my deeper, personal journey on here. It’s probably what has held this blog back for so long as I’ve struggled with where to place this – as thoughts somehow removed and objective, or much more personal reflections. Ultimately, and of course, I don’t see things from some objective or neutral third-party point of view. I see them from my point of view. And my point of view changes with my feelings. And my feelings are deep, and are inside my body. After all, how can a ‘human be natural’ as per the title of this blog, without feeling into their own nature? And so here I am, on a journey into myself, and out into the world, simultaneously, with each journey dependent on and interwoven with the other, like the symbol of the serpent consuming itself by the tail, or an infinity loop.
Last summer, my journey took me to a dance meditation workshop in the French Alps. For five days, with ten other women, I danced and delved and explored my body, my heart, my mind, my soul. Five rhythms with its mixture of dance, meditation, shamanism, and delving into what could be called the Jungian shadow-side is one of the most powerful tools of self-exploration and self-acceptance that I have so far come across. Something about the combination of expressive movement, embodied-ness, and guided motion through feelings moved me in profound ways that have continued and built over the last twelve months.
This post is not about five rhythms however, but about water, another aspect of our embodied experience. The two things are related however in that five rhythms has helped me to lean into my own embodied as well as expressive, imaginative nature. At least two important thinkers on water – Astrida Neimanis and Gaston Bachelard – who I’ll talk about a little more below, regard water as both a tool of the imagination and requiring the imagination to comprehend in terms of our own wateriness.
Back to the Alps and Heart of the Huntress. On a hot July day we arrive at the mountain retreat. People have traveled long distances, and even on the relatively short journey into the mountain, packed into the jeep that takes us from the small town of Praz-sur-Arly we can feel the sweat running down our backs and legs. We arrive at the retreat space, a beautifully restored stone and wood house nestled in the trees, with an expansive view over the valley to more mountains beyond. The house is off-grid, getting its electricity from solar panels, and a diesel-powered generator when necessary. Water is pumped at a slow trickle from an underground stream, and a large tank stores rainwater for all things other than drinking. The water levels in the tank are low when we arrive, due to a long dry spell.
Like much of Europe it had been extraordinarily dry here for some time. In the knowledge of this, we are advised to only take very short showers, and several people do. However, the next morning, we are informed that we have gone through four days worth of water in one day, and that if we continue at this rate we’ll have to cut the retreat short and go down into the town! Certainly none of us want that, and so we agree to ‘meditate into water’, using only the bare minimum for our needs.
For five days we dance, interspersing this with some walks in the woods/hills, archery, cooking and sharing meals, and some drawing, painting and creating. We dance our hearts out on each day, sweat glistening on our skin. In the evenings, if desired, we wash ourselves using about a quarter of a bucket of water. For me, these ablutions become sacred, religious almost. I wash my body reverently, using water from a bucket and a cloth. There is something ritualistic about this – a recognition of my own embodied nature and an acceptance of all the parts of me. In this recognition is that of accepting my embodied watery nature, my interconnectedness with that which sustains and holds my body literally and figuratively, and nourishes my soul. Both a separate, individual body, and one continuously in flow and only in existence as a kind of nodal point in an interconnectedness of things, a flow. I am reminded now of some words of Alan Watts, that we are not ‘made into’ something, but that we ‘grow out of the world’. We only are because all that we depend on is.
Astrida Neimanis suggests that we need to train ourselves out of ‘ontological hierarchy’, an understanding of reality that places us higher than any other form of existence. There is humility in recognizing ourselves as bodies of water – the continual flows of water through the body without which we cannot live, we do not exist.
At night, I hear the rushing of a river, very far down in a ravine. Apparently our intrepid leader Gina had attempted to access the river the year before, abseiling down some sheer cliff, until the risk level and difficulty of the task ruled it out (not before a minor injury that could have been much worse). And so we would sleep with the sound of distant rushing water, and meditate into the distance of it. A river, rushing, but just out of reach.
In the mornings we are awoken by Gina’s rich voice, her songs weaving in and out amongst the tepees and tents as she walks barefoot up the trails, a siren of the mountains rather than the sea. Among the songs one stays with me, and that we later sang in a round in the jeep on the way down the mountain, and much later I find myself walking alone along a shore, along a river, singing this song:
Listen
Lay yourself down on the rocks now
Let your body down in the river
Listen for the drumming on the other side
Lose yourself in the meantime
Listen
Let your body be your guide
Let the water decide
Lose yourself in the meantime
(Song: Listen (Eel River Song) by Meredith Buck, lyrics and audio to be found here: http://thebirdsings.com/listen/)
The song seemed to capture so many things about this experience. Listening, letting our bodies be the guide, letting the water decide. Apparently written by Meredith Buck on a women’s wilderness retreat after the experience of wading through a river blindfolded guided by the sound of drumming on the other side. The song of the river carries me into sleep and dream and out of it again. The veil between waking life and dream thins with each revolution of our planet, of our bodies, of our bodies that are planets, planets that are bodies.
In dreams, water is often said to represent emotion. The analogy extends to the different ways that water manifests in dreams, for instance a flood in which you are carried away could symbolize feeling overwhelmed by and out of control in the face of strong emotions. Of course, dream interpretation is a highly personal thing, as we discovered through practicing long-form dream interpretation on the retreat. At five rhythms retreats before and since I have found that my dreams are vivid, detailed, narratives imbued with emotion. Something about freeing up space in the body through movement perhaps enables this deeper delving into the subconscious. If water in dreams represents emotions, do emotions in waking life represent water? Are they water? Or ripples and vibrations felt in our own liquid selves?
In the mornings, awoken by the song, we drift towards the house, towards the music, and often the mists are also rising, up above the tall trees flowing up through the valley, like rivers in the sky. As we dance, the mists rise and dissipate, the sun shining through in shafts of light. The trees too are part of the flow, their every capillary alive with the movement of water, from the earth to the sky.
Bachelard writes of the four elements, fire, air, water and earth and suggests that all imagination is linked to one or more of these elements, that imagination is therefore linked to matter – is material imagination. In Bachelard’s thinking at least, water is ‘an element more feminine and more uniform than fire, a more constant one which symbolizes human powers that are more hidden, simple, and simplifying.’ I wonder about these powers that are more hidden, hidden depths of water, or tides and currents, subtle and potentially deadly… I recall walking on tidal flats in the Severn Estuary at very low tide. The ground shifting and unsteady, ready to pull a foot under if it lingered too long in one spot. Inviting only the swiftest of movements, along a path known by my guide. Knowing water, feeling into water, is to accept its mystery, its sometimes quiet power. Our absolute need of it, its vitality, our vitality, and its many qualities, solid, liquid, gas, its mutability. I wonder at engineering approaches: dams, culverts, concrete channels, tidal barrages, flood barriers, all the many ways that water is tamed, controlled, disallowed free movement, restricted. And I wonder at our own fluidity and how that is also tamed.
At Heart of the Huntress I released a lot of tears. A journey of sadness, river of sorrow, that I had first unleashed at my first Five Rhythms workshop, Call of the Heart, on the West coast of Wales. I was surprised by the depths of my own sorrow and for a while wondered at how I would be able to surface again. I did, and slowly, over time, I have come to a place of acceptance about these flows as well. Allowing this river to flow where it wants to means that in fact it is less likely to flood and overwhelm, but instead flows gently on, sunlight glittering on its surface.
Human Being Natural 