Imagining water in all their forms

Happy Gtige-giizis (Planting Moon)! Once in a blue moon (literally), you’ll get two emails in a single month from us, and this is that month! In case you didn’t know (like me), a blue moon is where a second full moon occurs in a single calendar month. Since the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days long, full moons usually occur a little earlier each month, and blue moons happen once every two-three years (hence the saying “once in a blue moon”).

We hope you have been enjoying the start of the gardening season and that your planting activities have been successful so far! This year, why not try planting the Three Sisters or trying other groups of plants that could work together? Not only do the plants benefit from each other’s company and special abilities, but mixed plantings are also more resilient than the row plantings many of us are used to seeing.

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• Do you want to get more involved with Little Forests Kingston? We’ve got some new roles in our organization, and we’d love to have you join us. If you’re interested, please fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!

• The Kingston Climate Summit is this week! There may be some tickets left if you’d like to attend. We will be hosting a multispecies workshop that we’re very excited about!

Water Imagining

Written by Joanne Whitfield and Josh Cowan
Voiced by Stephen Errington and Olivia Whitfield
Soundscape and Production by Olivia Whitfield
Recorded at North of Kingston recording studio

Listen to Water Imagining or read below:

Before we ask you to imagine yourself as a Water, take a moment to feel what it is like to be you, a human, right here today. To feel how you are shaped by this planet and the beings and forces who surround you, who are part of you, who depend on you and who you depend on. 

Take a deep breath in, feel your lungs filling with gases, microbes and water. Breathe out and share yourself with others as our breath mixes in this space. In this next breath, notice the coolness of the air going in. Breathing out, notice how your body has warmed that air and the water suspended in it. You’re sharing with your kin, Red Maple, Killdeer, Fungi, all your kin. 

Feel your heart beating, feel the Water moving through your body powered by this pump. Bringing nutrients to all your cells.  

We are, you and all your kin, creatures energized by sunlight, animated by water and fed by plants. All of us, water moving in and out of our bodies. Like water, subject to heat, cold, gravity. Like all our kin, we are mostly water. Where does Water end and we begin? Imagine us as Water. We are Water now. Now we are water. 

What does it feel like to leave one body as moisture in the breath? To join air, wait for the next inhalation and come together again? Moving in and out of all our kin, being Water. Water being. 

We have been part of every being- we are all just ways of being water – We continue. This is  a water planet, a water city, a blue city. We have been here for billions of years, almost from the start. Sometimes We are part of another, sometimes We are not and can move on our own. We have seen everything during that time because we are everywhere. Our memory is indescribably long.  

Energized by sunlight, We both move and rest, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, flowing quickly or being still. But not all at once, different parts of us moving or resting at the same time. 

Flying through the air, heated and cooled, We rise and fall, moving microbes and minerals high and low. We leave this room through that window, that door or through that wall. We make our own paths, it can take time but We always find a way.

Following the paths of roots, groundhogs and rocks; We seep into our mother, the Earth. Purified and cared for, We may rest in her womb for billions of years, travelling with mother-earth’s shifts and movement. As We rise up, We enter the rhizosphere-where the soil, the roots of plants and the microorganisms meet and share. We dissolve the nutrients both plants and microorganisms need, enabling their intake. The roots of plants bring us into their bodies and release us through their leaves, cooling themselves. Now as vapour, we join ourselves, those of us who were resting in a lake or a stream and we are pulled higher to colder realms. We come together condensing into a liquid- rain, or if it’s cold enough into a solid-snow or hail, and fall. If the ground is welcoming, covered in plants and healthy soil, we sink in again and repeat this movement. This is how we keep this place cool and provide a clean Us for those who drink. 

But if the ground is hard, dry, unnatural or already full, we can’t sink down. Then We move with gravity, downhill and take what is loose with us. Rushing to low ground, to river basins, we can destroy, in a process of renewal. 

From there we flow, down and out into oceans, joining into an enormous body. Seemingly water without end. Now the Moon moves us, pushing us up onto land and then pulling us out again. Day to night and back again. Concentration of salt, denser now, changing our movements, less likely to freeze. The Sun, heating and cooling, again acts, moving us in huge life-giving currents. We sink- into places that are the deepest and darkest in our or anyone’s existence. Then pulled up again. Ever moving, slow and fast. Eternal.

Those same forces pull us up, up as a gas now, higher and higher, into high altitude rivers of water-holding air. Moving us to the other side of the planet, to fall and nourish. Perhaps to fall here, on this spot. Where we enter the bodies of humans, as a drink or a breath. In and out. Cycling forever.