Lately I’ve been noticed something fascinating about water. With the monotonous regularity that we associate with many of life’s “chores”, I had got into the habit of descaling my kettle every 2 to 3 weeks. The water that I use is unadulterated spring water and, while it makes for the perfect cup of tea, it builds up to a hefty “crud” of limescale remarkably quickly…or at least it used to. These last few weeks, I had noticed my drinks having a different texture…somewhat chalky or even powdery, cloudy…and then I noticed I could clean the scale off the sides of the kettle with a gentle swirl, not the usual soaking and scrubbing. Day after day, it never gets any harder than this powdery deposit that swirls around freely when I shake the kettle and even a less observant member of the family commented on how it was “acting weird” forming gentle strings of deposit in the kettle yet never going hard. Its been over a months since I had to use a sachet of limescale remover as I can now clean the kettle easily with the tickle of a brush!

This might have escaped my attention for a little longer except for the fact it is exactly how I’ve been feeling too. The old things that used to “build up” no longer seem to stick to the sides of me. Things that used to bother me, that triggered me, that sent me into tremors of fear or threw me off my track and out of my bliss, simply don’t (or not for very long). Even when those more pervasive, subtler, stealthier mindsets and energies come along to (potentially) knock me off track, they don’t carry me with them like they used to. I remember there’s a choice to “think that” and that I can, just as easily, think other thoughts, pursue other activities that feel better. I get to make my every moment through my self-derived reactions and what I choose to create.

I also notice how I have now passed several milestones of tradition, those mass-consciousness remembrance anniversaries or, you could say, culturally determined woe-parties focussed upon raking over the past, bleeding over old wounds and behaving a certain way around conventions we tip-toe around and yet I have chosen not to engage any more (however much that can feel like some sort of heresy in the face of other people’s beliefs). As a result, I find its like they never even existed; that those culturally engrained preoccupations with history, with tragedy, held like old grudges and wounds that can never be allowed to heal while we keep the story of them alive in our annual cycles, held as immutably as the very seasons of the year, have now dissolved for me, like limescale in a kettle. Its like they never even happened, have dematerialised or, at least, the materials that constituted them have been broken down into molecules and reconstituted into something far more fluid that softens us as it flows through us as the understanding of what we have been through without all the rawness or blood-red wounding of revived pain. I can’t unknow what we have been through collectively (or as me personally) but I find I can use this experience in entirely new ways now.

And I know this is the sacred feminine in action; that this is her mechanism in the world as she heals us all individually and collectively. Women (perhaps most of all) have become the experts at scaling up their sides with painful, inflexible walls of self-protection that have become our own prison cells; now, our chrysalis. When we choose where to place our attention…with highest consciousness…we act as our own descaler, removing layers and layers of hardness that obscured who we really were beneath and so we break free from the prison that never really was, revealing our true colours and taking flight. Suddenly, we are left with edges that shine, juxtaposed with the soft milky flow of who we really are in our humanness; defined just as much as we want it to be but not encrusted to our sides and become like a plaster of Paris that prevents us from moving. I realise I have used the analogy of “calcification” so many times across years of blog-writing about health and stuck mindsets; so I take such heart from these clues, in my environment, that we are now into a new phase; one where nothing has to feel so repetitious or entrenched that it has time to form a barrier or a wall between one heart and another.

It was so interesting, when the “water thing” first happened, to start realising that calcium-enriched water is a version of the sacred feminine made manifest. It had never even occurred to me that water comes in more than one variety…or, not until I went to Glastonbury and had such a powerful experience with the iron-red waters of the Chalice Well and the very different waters of the calcium-rich White Spring (written about in my earlier post Uncommon Alchemy). In a world where our own inner calcium source is plentiful and flowing, not used-up to build walls of self-protection, women’s bodies don’t have to deplete their bones in search of the calcium they lack until they are bowed over with the osteoporosis of “old age”, the crippled, bowed-down product of all the years of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul in their own biology. They become stronger, not weaker, as they step into the vast wisdom of their maturer years; and they stand up oh-so very tall, no longer cowered down by their amassed experiences.

When my kettle started behaving weirdly, I was using different water to usual, drawn from the ancient spring at St Anne’s Well, Buxton in Derbyshire, not all that far from where I grew up (in fact, I have no doubt the soft drinking water of my childhood came from those same Derbyshire hills; I found the water so much harder when I moved south). Trawling for all I could find about this spring, I discovered it is a very ancient goddess water source (its use going back at least 7000 years) and considered a major cultural centre long before the Roman’s discovered it; no doubt because of that water. When those Roman’s arrived, they considered this spring to be as important as that other goddess water source that I have talked about before, Aqua Sulis at Bath; denoted by the fact these were the only two towns given the name “Aqua” in their name. Its Roman name “Aquae Arnemetiae” literally means the “Waters of Arnemetia” or “the water of she who dwelt against the sacred grove”; Arnemetia being the local goddess revered by the Britons in that region. Those who drank from the thermal waters of Arnemetia, which come up through Carboniferous Limestone from a great depth (groundwater tests suggest the water is 5000 years old as it emerges), which is thought to explain the high magnesium content, were said to be cured of wasting diseases and all manner of sickness.

These ancient goddess springs, though subtly different in their constitution, share in common their high mineral content and I know, from my own healing journey, how important the equilibrium of freely moving key minerals is to human biology. Close by in those same Buxton hills, I read, there is also an iron-red source of water (as in Glastonbury); and, I suspect, it is nature’s way to provide this counter-poise of complementary qualities close-by to each other in the same landscape; no less, the human body. Many of the streams of the heathery heathlands of Berkshire-Surrey where I used to walk my dog during the days of chronic illness run deep orangey-red with iron, which at once fascinated and stirred (almost provoked) me at the time yet I think it was just what I needed at that stage of my recovery; like a tonic to make me stronger. Lately, I feel almost turned-off by those old-familiar places and have been seeking the softer-seeming water of the very different landscape further west and south; yet with no judgement intended, just a a desire to follow a different impulse driving what I most need right now in my journey towards ever-better equilibrium. I have come to realise that I need both my sacred masculine and feminine aspects, working together seamlessly as one; that, where one or other of them is floundering, I do better if I recalibrate using a variety of mechanisms at my disposal that help me tip that balance. We all have these impulses driving us, if we but listen to them; they tell us subtle things about what we want to be eating, where we want to be living, how we want to be behaving all the time.

Since discovering Buxton’s goddess water source, I have switched back and forth with my usual water source and still noticed the newly observed limescale effect; not once have I had to descale my kettle, nor have I needed to do more than the softest recalibration of myself to recover from any of life’s ups and downs, either physical or emotional. Free-flowing and soft…sustained without the need for hardness or entrenchment, brittle edges or barriers…this is how I’m newly feeling and (I think, to varying degrees) we all are. We might not all be open to noticing these subtle, elemental variations in our familiar world yet they are still happening behind the scenes; as though we are all being dissolved and then reconstituted from the same mineral ingredients as before (“the same” enough that we think nothing has altered and yet…somehow… we are quite different). Even this week, which has been taxing and triggering in the extreme, I can feel difference in people’s reactions all around me; played out as a new degree of receptivity, fluidity, gentleness, malleability and adaptability in people’s responses to situations that might have triggered and entrenched them before. Many more people than ever are prepared to look at things differently. I am seeing more yielding; the kind that is not about weakness but, actually, about a deeper and more pervasive, even more authentic form of strength because it uses what we have all been through – together – as the softening-agent that feeds back into the water of life and better serves us all. Our collective experiences become the newly liberated minerals that provide nutrition rather than the calcified barricades that separate us further.

Water is literally everything in our world; it accounts for most of our biology and its behaviour reflects the vibration of what is going on in our mass consciousness, like a litmus paper test of our evolution. You may scoff at the pseudo-science that I am playing with here yet I know there is a deeper truth to what I am experiencing at both the literal and metaphorical levels. When I see water softening before my very eyes, however much heat and pressure is being applied to it, this tells me the sacred feminine aspect is rising into our biology and her effect will be felt in a world that starts to heal itself from the inside out, flowing between us as the only truly immutable force that is left; that of the indisputable connection between us all.