Celebrating Water

Water leads me on a sacred path and has for a long time.

The ocean is in my blood. It’s in everyone’s, for we are oceans walking on land with our salty fluids and heartbeat’s ebb and flow. Our first nine months is in our mother’s inner ocean, amnionic sea. My second nine months, I was strolled on the boardwalk every day, the roar of ocean waves my lullaby. I consider the ocean my first friend, a constant companion beyond my family circle.

Water leads me on a sacred path and has for a long time. As a child, I’d ride my bike a few miles to a park to sit in the woods and find refuge by the side of a stream. As a traveler, I’d seek places where mountains met sea. When my spiritual path began to deepen in my 20s, places began to draw me to them and a pattern emerged, though I didn’t see it for awhile.

Photo: Mara Alper

With each experience my soul is warmed, and my heart fills with a joyful peace I cannot describe.

I lived in a cave near a small village on Crete facing the Mediterranean Sea and watched the moon pass through her phases for two months, the sea rising and falling with her. Journeyed to rain ceremonies with the Huichol people in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains, where I studied with the shamans and drank their peyote water. Returned to Bali many times to share the sacredness of water in their rituals and found my way to a high priestess there who performs water purification ceremonies where we are blessed and drenched and sanctified. With each experience my soul is warmed, and my heart fills with a joyful peace I cannot describe.

Receiving water purification in Bali from Ida Resi Alit. Photo Mara Alper

We can only be humbly grateful when we honor these calls, for we do not create them ourselves. But we do choose whether to heed them or not. Sometimes the call is not clear until we are called again and again, and then we finally recognize its voice. Call it divine, god, goddess, beloved, soul, spirit, it matters not. All that matters is that we listen and act accordingly.

I am sitting by a river in Vietnam as I write this. Thought I’d find a little cafe with coffee on one of the bustling streets of Hoi An. But on the way a sign caught my eye, and I meandered into a lush garden only to find the river at the end. Where else should one write a water story honoring World Water Day?

Floating on the Mekong River. Photo: Mara Alper

A few days ago, I flew above the sinuous Mekong River, winding its way through five countries before it reaches Vietnam. It is muddy and mighty, supporting millions of people along its route before it flows into “Vietnam’s Garden,” the Mekong River Delta. Coming here is a kind of pilgrimage for me, though I cannot tell you why I am drawn here, why it calls me from around the world. But here I am. I expect I will understand more fully with time.

The threats to its well-being are multiple, but now it is active, yet serene, abundant. Its beauty and diversity touch every sense.

This region is a mesh of rivers and canals, water channels easier for travel than congested streets. Boats full of fishing nets, local coconuts, bricks, hay, and rice chug passed. Small sampans glide by piled high with shrimp traps made from bamboo. Floating markets sell every vegetable and fruit this fertile delta has to offer. It is a water world that I visit for the first time, but probably not the last. I’d read about it for years, teach about it in my water classes. The threats to its well-being are multiple, but now it is active, yet serene, abundant. Its beauty and diversity touch every sense.

Photo: Mara Alper

On March 22 each year, we celebrate World Water Day. This year, I will mark it with my own small ceremony by river’s edge reflecting on my water journey and grateful for water in every way possible.

Water is sacred in Bali. It is essential to all the ceremonies that grace everyday life on this Indonesian island. Mara’s poetic documentary above offers rituals and music of traditional Bali Hindu culture that endure amidst modernity. (19:00)

Action step: You know water comes from the tap, but do you know how much water goes into your sandwich? Your gadgets? The electricity that powers them? You’ll be amazed when you check it out at Water Footprint Calculator.

Mara Alper is an award-winning media artist with work screened nationally and internationally. She recently retired from Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, where she taught video production and courses about water issues. See more video art and documentaries at MaraAlper.com and read her blog “Re-Imagining Water” at maraalper.blogspot.com.