What happens these days when I decide to add a new Goddess word to this blog is that I scan my original "list" or page-full of terms, and just see which word calls to me. Today's word is, "waters". I'm not sure why I wrote it in the plural, and I am pretty sure I meant the noun, not the verb (as in, "she waters the garden"). However, it doesn't really matter. May it resonate in whatever way it needs to on this rainy day in northern Minnesota.
As with all the words I'll be adding to this series of posts, there is no way to cover "water" in a few paragraphs. Why do I think of water as connected with the Goddess? Because it is indispensable. The waters of our mother's womb feed us and keep us safe before birth, and after birth, we cannot survive without water either, and neither can most forms of life on earth. It's almost like an invisible umbilical cord, linking us to Her, and to all creation. In a healthy state, the waters of earth may be Nature's greatest gift -- which is why it is so painful to think about the ways we humans have so thoughtlessly trashed them. Water is power, and it is powerful. It can make the modern way of life viable, and it can destroy that way of life.
I am grateful for my first years in Duluth, during the 1990's, because I think my proximity to Lake Superior helped bring me to a sense of connection with the Goddess. At times, I lived on Park Point, and literally all but lived in the water. Yesterday, for the first time in two years, I took the bus down the Point and took a swim. I had forgotten how much I love sitting on the sandy beach, and walking into the frigid waters. You look out to a stark horizon, literally sky and water. With the exception of the occasional ore ship (and these days, cruise ships!), there isn't anything manmade in sight. Sand underfoot, water, and air -- life at its most elemental. All water reminds me of the Goddess, but perhaps Lake Superior most of all.
One of my favorite, classic English cathedral anthems is John Ireland's "Greater Love", with the biblical words, "Many waters cannot quench Love, neither can the floods drown it". In the midst of a flooding crisis such as people are experiencing in the southern U.S., it must be hard to believe this. When a flood swallows up your belongings, or even friends or family members, the event must take years to come to terms with, much less to see "love" in. But I understand this saying now more than I possibly could have done the first time I heard the anthem fifty or sixty years ago. Love is all there is. It cannot be "quenched" by water, or burned away by fire, or covered over in landslides, or killed off by man. It is all that exists. If there is even just one thing or person that you love in this world, that love is eternal.
One last kind of water for today: tears. I have shed a lot of them the last few days. I think it finally hit me how alone I've been in the world, from the moment I was born. Many newborns experience a less-than-enthusiastic welcome for a host of reasons, not just because of a father incapable of love. But such a start imprints a pattern on your life that it is hard to evolve out of. As I slowly start to actually feel Love (not just understand it intellectually), I am also feeling more acutely where it was/is and was not/is not in my life. I suspect that Mother Earth is also shedding her share of tears right now. I started to describe her as I would a transcendent male god, watching us from above, but of course She is here in us, around us, and underfoot. How She must wish we would respect the waters She gifted us with, and keep them clean.
