Liquid Meditation

It’s a miracle to me, how dust lands and eventually merges with bedrock, embedding records of time in the process. Remarkable, how previous eras and civilizations are held within the earth. Our careful digging can uncover history, revealing ancient clues about our present and future. Used wisely, history is a gift.

Yet personal dust seems to land inside our minds to less magical effect. Issues, challenges, thoughts, emotions can pile up and soil us. External events and endless electronic chatter about them can sting as sandstorms too. It’s easy to feel smothered, when too much dust lands upon us without being swept away.

Personally, I cleanse by returning my focus to the simple miracle of water. It doesn’t have to be a physical cleansing, although immersion in a stream, lake, shower, or hot tub may do wonders. Simply recalling water’s miracle is enough to restore proper perspective, and therefore celebrate the day instead of worry over it.

What a wondrous substance water is, even more than bedrock and dust! What a rare miracle, to be alive on a planet where water’s abundance hosts a spectacular array of life! The bedrock proves that all current lifeforms are only a small part of what has previously been alive on earth, and likely a small part of all that has yet to be.

I turn on the faucet, just a trickle, to begin my remembrance. What a supple and pure substance water is, flowing so gracefully around my fingers, sparkling with every glint of morning light as it flows. It becomes a hypnotizing, liquid meditation.

I remember how central my meditations on water’s flow have been to finding my own movement through the world. What would water do? That’s been a central daily question, since I first included that meditation in my book Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path over two decades ago. It’s hardly original, but it’s a perennial guide. The answer is always different with every new day, and the question is always apt.

Next, I recall our kinship with single droplets in a roaring waterfall, raging with snowmelt. How many times I’ve stood by the majestic falls along Oregon’s McKenzie River, in particular, focusing on the paths of single drop after drop as each dances down, distinct for a moment, then rejoining the greater river in a way I can no longer distinguish. That is me, I think to myself. That is each of us. Again the liquid meditation absorbs me completely, when I give myself over to it. It washes away all other concerns for a lengthy, immeasurable moment.

When possible, I seek the graceful sound of the sea as a cleansing too. Particularly during the pandemic and after my mother’s passing, I sought the ocean’s edge as my refuge. The vastness of those waters; the inevitability of us all becoming a part of them; the feel of the wind off the water blowing right through my soul, carrying off my weighty emotional sands. All that and more then healed me, restored me. Water helped me recall my own worthy place beyond the immediacy of pain.

I continue my liquid meditation by refreshing my amazement at the sheer volume of water contained within that ocean. Whenever blessed to fly over it, I’m newly astonished by how vast and deep those primordial expanses are. After landing in Hawaii, I’ve been reminded by snorkeling on shore’s edge just how infinitely expressive and vibrant sea life is too. It’s wildly different yet related to our own land-based lives. Being with those underwater lives gives me back an expansive perspective. It makes my own momentary worries seem inconsequential.

The river of recall flows on. I feel amazed by how long the rivers have been flowing here, without ever a moment’s pause. How crystalline the art is within a single snowflake, when a few finally fall in the warming forests where I live. How central a simple glass of water is, when a walk through the forest is done. How restorative, the luxurious steam of a shower, following the cleansing sweat of working my land to keep wildfire boundaries defensible.

My liquid meditation eventually returns to stillness, as in the stillness of a morning lake, and its glassy reflections of soul. Such water is a mirror of our own capabilities of beauty, found most clearly in stillness rather than in a rush. It’s a reminder that our own most effective action in the world often comes after pausing in stillness first. As the meditative bumper sticker says, Don’t just do something. Sit there. Only after stillness reveals our best path, after water washes the dust off our inner eye, can we return to clarity of action and feeling. Stillness is bedrock too, in a sense.

I celebrate liquid stillness again this morning. A busy day, week, life yet lies ahead. But I will flow through it more cleanly after first sitting again this morning, to listen to the guidance the morning lake quietly gives me. Thank you for joining me here in stillness, across the distance. May it bring us both new clarity.