A Bowl of Rain: Press play on the video below as you experience...
Water is memory. Its essential form has passed through bodies, through life, since life has existed. It is heavy with the journey it has taken. It crashes joyfully through crystal streambeds. It is supremely still, carrying the history in its molecules. It stagnates in chemical wastelands.
During the Holocene, Ancestral Puebloans harvested ice from caves during droughts:
“For more than 10,000 years, the people who lived on the arid landscape of modern-day western New Mexico were renowned for their complex societies, unique architecture and early economic and political systems. But surviving in what Spanish explorers would later name El Malpais, or the "bad lands," required ingenuity now explained for the first time by a team led by University of South Florida geoscientists.
Exploring an ice-laden lava tube of the El Malpais National Monument, and using precisely radiocarbon-dated charcoal found deep in an ice deposit in the lava tube, U.S. National Science Foundation-funded geoscientist Bogdan Onac and his team discovered that ancestral Puebloans survived devastating droughts by traveling deep into the caves to melt ancient ice as a water resource.
Dating back as far as AD 150 to 950, these water-gatherers left behind charred material, indicating that they started small fires to melt the ice to collect as drinking water, or perhaps for religious rituals. The researchers published their discovery in the journal Scientific Reports.
Droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends and migration of the complex ancestral Puebloan societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Researchers claim the discovery from ice deposits presents "unambiguous evidence" of five drought events that impacted ancestral Puebloan society.
"This discovery sheds light on one of the many human-environment interactions in the Southwest at a time when climate change forced people to find water resources in unexpected places," Onac said, noting that the geological conditions that supported the discovery are now threatened by modern climate change.” - National Science Foundation
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=301713&org=NSF&from=news
We stand on the mighty shoulders of those we erase, ignore, marginalize and perpetuate violence against. We occupy their lands and gifts.
From Flint Michigan to Standing Rock we know billions lack access to water. Water is life not a commodity.
At FWC, we have to ask ourselves every day to think about how we can be more intentional in our use of water in our practices of beauty, nourishment, and sustenance. To learn from those before us, those here with us now, and those in the future, how to honor, protect and conserve this life – water.
Water is the sustaining life for creation. It nurtures seedlings, grows forests, binds paints, scores oceans, feeds florals, guides rituals for healing. When we see beauty, we honor the water that flows through it. I honor the water that flows through me bring the memory of creators that came before me. The holders of beauty, the creators of community, and bringers of life.
As a survivor of sexual assault, water often brings me back to myself in a crisis. Just the sound of rushing water centers me; drinking, bathing, swimming, being present with and in water. And that is the most sacred beauty of water for me. It connects me with the people before me. It sustains me. It grounds me. And it nourishes me.
In Deep love, Filled with Color.