All is dark. I am small. I am at the waters edge. All around me is sky and the sound of gentle, still, water. It is night. I am so focused on what is in front of me that I hardly see the outline of trees — dark silhouettes swaying in the quiet, still air, standing watch — ancestors. Mountains rise through the night sky — a far off horizon, tucked heavily behind the deep waters stretched out in front of me.
Dusk light imbues the air with a soft glow, and stars carpet the sky above — the Milky Way — a dusting of glowing orbs, the cosmos swirling in the abyss above. She fills the air in front of me.
She.
She fills the air, the space — the wholeness of my mind.
She.
I cannot look away. I hardly dare. I am hardly breathing, in reverence, in awe of her beauty — her terror.
She does not speak like we do — and when I am with her, I do not either. The beingness that I am filling with the sound of her thousand voices, every one of them twinkling - like ice crystals, or the aurora singing across night sky. I feel I will burst with her communication, this vibration, a frequency, more so, then an uttered sound. Her robes - azure blue - ripple like the lake, like the sky, like water. They spill, like waves, undulating from her being, cascading to lake below, spreading like waters whipped into frosted crests.
The immensity of her being, this water spirit, towers before me. I am like a child, crouched at the edge of the lake, and she, in the misted air above this darkened lake, simply is - rising and falling simultaneously. She is terrifying, and beautiful, entrancing but sets a chill into my blood — both elder and youth — she has no age and so many faces I give up trying to settle on seeing her as any one thing - she is many, like the waters she is made of. She simply is. As we simply are.
The earth is so hungry for our compassion, the water so eager for our attention and dedication, sometimes she is more dark than light but that feels natural - for she is that which is everything.
I listen, breathing through fear, adamant that I will honour the beauty and grace of this visit. She tells me that there is much work to be done to honour ancestors who lived long ago — who spoke medicine into the world, and conversed with the waters, and plants — the sun, the moon and stars.
The land feels alone now — she tells me, with making prayers to her, feeding the fire, feeding the land, she, too, is fed. She is the water that flows through the mountains, lakes, rivers — all the way to the ocean, even. She is the keeper of the spirit of the mountains, she is the air and light and water and movement and shifting life fertilizing soil season change to season change. She is the air. And the land. And the forest floor. She is water, she is river, she is the way to the sky — to the stars.
Here in the quietness of dreams I see that she is the heart of the everything that is — the heart of this lake, the heart of this land, the heart of these waterways. It is her. All is water. She simply is. She is the water heart — a heart to everything that is.
I see the mountains, myriad streams and rivers flowing and flowing and flowing. In and through and around each other. I see a crest, a great head waters — one side flows all the way to the ocean — the other to our heart waters, and all I hear is “the head and the heart connect. The head and the heart waters must always stay connected.”