A Blessing of Waters

As soon as we come in out of the heat, she heads for the kitchen. First stop is the food bowl in case something new has materialized. Then it’s to the water. She gives it a few good laps then ambles over to collapse on her bed by the balcony doors. 

I try to keep her water filled. Sometimes I forget and all that greets her is a rank two-day old puddle, if that. She doesn’t know how to signal it’s time for a refill. It’s up to me to remember to keep track but lately my attention is slippery. These are not my proudest moments, when I can’t recall the last time she had something within reach to drink.

Why does it bring me such pleasure to give her bowl a rinse and fill it all the way up fresh from the tap? It’s not like she’s picky. This is a creature that would eat a three-day-old chicken bone from under a picnic table if I didn’t pry it from her throat. She’d be more than happy with whatever fetid pool she found in her bowl. 

But even if she can’t tell Evian from pond sludge, something pulls me to nourish her. She’s my girl, providing unwavering good company no matter how foul my mood or how far my spirit has strayed. Topping her off with a fresh pour of clean water seems like the right offering to express gratitude for this kinship across species. A common tongue, our common thirst. 

Most days I remember to do this for myself as well. To quench, and to savor the quenching. Like her, when we return from the heat, I usually take a drink first thing. A cold bottle from the refrigerator filling the tall glass on the counter. Filling me.
Hydration, sure. But it’s also a way to mark completion. The dog and her person, both standing in the kitchen though one bent to the floor and one tipped back at the counter. We journeyed, we have returned intact! A toast, my friend, to our continued good health! Here we are, putting our mouths to these small vessels that contain tiny drops of everything. Here we are, taking the water blessing.

This way we bring oceans into ourselves. And lagoons and ice sheets and roiling thunderheads. We open to the current that flows and keeps flowing, always from the depths, passing through all our living kin, through us, then back out again. The way water pulses along our living, porous meat. Filtering, feeding our blood and tissues and even bones. 

Each of us a churning, damp organism afloat on the water planet. Each of us far more similar to the tardigrade and hippo and magnolia than we are different.

Isn’t it a marvel? That all of us, even the creatures of earth and air, start in water? The egg of your average sparrow, fertilizing and becoming, is 75% water. And while a caterpillar in a chrysalis does not eat or drink, the cocoon is porous and absorbs enough surrounding humidity to transform into butterfly. 

All of us begin in the wet. For whatever period we need to gestate or germinate or fertilize or crystalize, we do so bathed in water.

Thirst takes many forms. So does the water communion. 

Here at the height of summer, my only outing (beyond dragging the pooch through our searing midday slog) is to the pool. It’s one building away, about half a city block in my little condo complex. Many days, the walk itself is enough to do me in. So I pace myself. Rest for hours, sometimes the better part of a week, to work up the energy. Stamina being what it is, my pool visits last about 20 minutes. At that point, fatigue falls over me like a blanket of stone. 

But oh, those 20 minutes!

One of my neighbors, new to the building, is incredulous. “I can’t believe my rent covers this!” On breaks between grueling shifts as a surgical resident, she dashes over with her sunscreen and goggles and plays like a child. 

Here we are, the afflicted and the healer. Our shared revival. Our return to the source.

It doesn’t matter that it is small enough that you can almost swim the length and back without coming up for air. We flock to it, like wild things to the watering hole. Neighborhood kids splash and screech. Seniors bob on foam noodles, joints momentarily relieved from the burdens of gravity. Couples sun until their oiled skin needs a cooling off and they slide in together, limbs twining, sensual and sleepy. 

This pool is a pocket of sustenance, like the dog’s bowl, like the glass waiting on the counter at home. But an inversion: instead of lifting water to body, we lower body to water. It is all the same, though, isn’t it? The way we open ourselves to this nourishment and cleansing. The way we feed ourselves on the very thing that pulses through all of us.

The way we are so much more like the roots under the soil than we are different, thirsting and following trails to the source like dowsing rods. 

We almost have to work to miss what is sacred here. Even in those times we have lost the signal, unable to tune ourselves to spirit, to anything but our own pain. Even in these times, we find our way to the water. And it cannot help but find its way to us. 

Our thirst, a sacred calling. Our watering of the plants in our garden, our pets, our children – all ways we know without knowing that we are both vessels for and makers of our shared baptism.

We belong to the sacred cycle, returning to the water again and again and again.