Water Babies At Heart

One of my current practices in living myself through the Five Elements is courtship. When courting, you study your lover's freckle patterns, their favorite foods, the sound of their voice before drifting off to sleep at night. You learn the way they feel, smell, taste, and sound. 

I have been curiously taking this courtship to each element of the seasonal wheel in an effort to find some previously unexplored level of intimacy. Being in the Water element / winter season part of the year, I have been wondering what the inner-language or secret imaginings of Water might sound like?

The sacred creek that runs off the mountain where I live was happily willing to play along. This is a little excerpt of our conversation...

CREEK

Slippery fingers running through mountain cracks, drip, drip, dripping into muddy puddles to be gulped by thirsty Songbirds, soaking into the calluses of Cottonwood heels, washing the eyelashes, the lips of Earthworm, strengthening the invisible dwellings of Nixie and Water Nymph, feeding the pelvic basins of Marsh Marigold and Swamp Cabbage, petting the heads of Frogs in their silty hiding places, racing faster and faster with River, longing for the Lake, the briny Ocean and its deep sea-growl, where I pause to hear the cosmic spanda, caress Whale nipples, intermingle with Mermaid saliva and Seahorse sweat, only to float off again, becoming pregnant Thunder Clouds and honeyed Spring Rain that fills tea cups, breastmilk naps, bathtub whirlpools, sinking, gurgling down the drain with an astonishment at the amniotic beginnings of us all.

My womb gathers the world's tears. My star-crushed blood is so old it knows the innards of every being. Change is my nightly lullaby, my porridge breakfast, my one, reliable drink. The only constant really, though you humans hurt yourselves horrendously in your relentless resistance against it. 

I am poisoned, revered, dammed, cherished, devoured, dried to a drop and still I persist, change course, sink underground, ascend to the heavens, and make wild lunges towards freedom. I honor surrender as a regenerative necessity. I support transmutation as an essential survival strategy within this apocalyptic landscape. I uphold flexibility and its lack of absolutes, the way it always knows how to dip and weave, bend and bow towards what is most life-giving.

HUMAN

Big gods hover everywhere here, just waiting to be noticed. The mountain Creek that lives by my house appears timid but when I am close I feel its motherly oceans eager for acknowledgement. On full moon nights, I swear its waters expand and turn to liquid sex-shimmer. Bodies float past, pale limbs stroke, spirits tangle, and the currents mix with milk and semen. All waters know the wellbeing of other waters and I hope that these pleasure-filled evenings keep the global channels fully fed. 

In the hushed mornings after this cavorting, I find my favorite sitting-stump by the Creek. With the seriousness of grandmother Ice, these waters urge me to invite in Change-mind, where there is no linear time, no set or isolated variables, no bargain to be made with uncertainty, no line-graph life. I dip my fingers into these swirling waters and add more names to the love story: Mountain Creek, Mullein, Cardinal, Morel Mushroom, Eastern Cedar, Morning Mist, Red Eft, Peregrine Falcon, Main Road, Black Ash, Monkton Quartzite, Slug, on and on with no beginning and no end. 

I will never know where they come from, the phantom springs that emerge from the heart of this mountain. But the steel-trap memory of Creek knows. Tuning into its deep space moans, I hear the dew speaking with subterranean volcanic flows. I sense a birthing tub ripe with broken membranes conversing with the vernal pond down the road. I know the waters in my bladder are waiting to hold discourse with the rain water in our leach field. I feel how we are all still amniotic sacs, portable primordial oceans, water babies at heart.