25/08/2024
with .repost
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My journey with water spirit has been a long one. Being Scottish you’ve got to know that that journey started with the rain. I don’t remember many days from my youth that were not overcast and clouded by the gray drizzling sky or when my feet were not soggy from the damp ground beneath my feet.
It’s not a very romantic aspect of water spirit except for those who dream of dreary days and long nights in which to nurture their soul away from people. Maybe I should be more aware that I have lived in water spirit breathed it though my skin and soaked it up through my toes. I have felt itvmingle with the Earth and inhaled the intoxicating smell of peat bogs, mud, puddles, ponds and free flowing burns. Even the rain on the green lush forest smells different to the rain that falls straight from the sky. I grew up in a cold climate rainforest that was never presented as particularly magical despite all the Scottish folk tales.
Our Scottish stories felt swept up in cultural trauma, bad memories and grief at the places that we could no longer return to. A remembering of who we were as a people that could no longer be remembered through the stone and concrete of our institutional prisons. And yet! We dreamed of far off places in tales of treasure islands and Caribbean adventures. We were and are a nation of sailors, merchants, pirates and slavers in search for gold and untold riches to make up for the loss of our own.
I grew up on The Firth of Clyde a river that exported an empire and taints so much of our world’s history.
Mama Water and ocean consciousness despite its proximity was polluted by industry, war, capitalism, colonialism and imperial ambition. The water was murky, dirty and toxic with it. In some places The Clyde was probably deadly as was the rain that blew over from Chernobyl. I was only wee and this was my introduction to water spirit.
🌈🍉