“Hey! What do you see?”
“Water!” she directs her tiny finger to my shirt. I follow her intent gaze to the scene depicted on my beloved graphic tee.
For nannying today I sport my Where The Wild Things Are shirt, a treasured buy from Out Of Print (a book lover’s apparel dream). The cover of the cherished literary classic includes a giant gray creature, a noble and untamed Wild Thing, napping amongst palm trees near the water’s edge. The water swirls in adventuresome blue waves.
“Water!” she proclaims, her toddler voice enthusiastic and determined.
This is a game she and I play, mostly with photographs, in pages of books, and when we go outside to look up at the sky.
“What do you see?” I’ll begin, and she’ll answer in riveted delight.
She sees the water, first. Not the Wild Thing or the trees, or the sail boat coasting along those beckoning waves. She notices the water – and her exclamation sets in motion my own inner homecoming.
This is a game I play with the Universe, and the Universe plays lovingly with me.
The mention of water returns me to being like water, fluid in embodied presence so I can be awake, attentive and capable of adapting to the dynamics of the ever-changing life scene.
Water is my spirit-word for my 31st year.
I choose my spirit-word on my birthday eve.
For my 30th year, I traveled around the sun with “magic” as my spirit-word.
Magic brought me home to my body, to the medicine and wellbeing that naturally occurs when living honorably and in season with my menstrual cycle. I became a bride to the subconscious and magic taught me the language of my emotions, prompted me to include my shadows and wounds in the vastness of my heart, and the magic of radical acceptance unleashed a re-remembering of wholeness that leaves me kinder and stronger in myself.
This year, as I steadied myself in stillness and tuned into my depths, I introduced words and felt their energetic resonance from within.
Harmony. Ease. Nourishment.
And then WATER emerged from the oceanic hum of my heart. The visceral response cued the aligned YES: an exhalation that exquisitely emptied, a tension around my shoulders that instantly lessened, and I became aware of a subtle grasp I had been holding around the moment and the gripping dissipated.
I choose water and water chooses me. This is my spirit-word I lean into for inspiration, guidance, a compass for how to meet myself and swim with the tides of life.
“Water!” the toddler tells me, and I hear her.
Listen like water. Move like water. Let the moment be like water.
I realign with the here and now. Here I am. I am here.
I receive the breath. I return to the aliveness that is available in the present, and reconnect to the purest gifts that are the right now – sharing this morning with her, witnessing her express and experience the world and freeing myself to be awake to this wonder.
Let the wonder river through me.
I choose again to flow with the unfolding stream, and in choosing to flow, the wisdom of water resurfaces and restores hydrated embodied presence back to me.
In a state of embodied presence, all conscious responses to the moment and whatever shape the moment takes, arise and actualize in present-answered alignment.
May I be water.
Water rinses resistance, smoothing roughness with gentleness.
Water takes the shape of any container, flowing with awe-inspiring flexibility while still remaining in its clear integrity.
Water washes away what is not mine to carry and detoxifies, cleansing my energetic field, my liver, my heart-center so I can be sovereign and in rhythm with my authenticity.
Water warns me not to stagnate – let my emotions speak, let my life move forward, let there be healing and a thriving, and let the choice that exudes ease be the current I take.
And right now, that current brings me to the brilliant wide-eyes of the toddler who speaks my spirit-word out-loud.
“Water!”
She lives in the ocean of consciousness. She’s my teacher on how to swim.
For my 31st year, I'm wholeheartedly ready to dive in.