Welcome, dear readers, to another month of taking metta off the meditation cushion and out into everyday life.
Last month found me walking barefoot along the beach of a life bardo in “Metta’s Sea Change.” This month found me lacing up hiking boots ready to take next steps again.
Children are often asked what they want to do when they grow up. After taking gardening leave from meditation practice and grieving an outdated dream, I felt the Dharma asking me the same after much growing up too.
Seawater lapping at my ankles with every step and salty tidemarks rising up my hemlines with every walk, I felt the call of a new element after three years learning to listen to the land volunteering on organic farms and at retreat centers.
And so I spent the next few weeks devouring dozens of interviews with water researcher Veda Austin, learning all about its structure, phases, healing properties, memories, mythologies, and ability to communicate through hydroglyphs—water’s equivalent of hieroglyphs!
Veda’s own deep dive began when she was recovering from a serious car accident that had killed the driver and left her needing several surgeries. Someone suggested that she experiment in drinking water from one of New Zealand’s most alkaline hot springs and, much to her surprise, a few days later glass shards embedded in her body like shrapnel from the crash began to resurface on her skin. This also helped me make more sense of why tidal waves of unexpected grief had surfaced on my beach walks last month.
A visual artist by training, she went on to spend years observing and photographing water under magnification in its crystalline state between liquid and ice. The biggest revelation for me from all her interviews were her experiments placing seeds in water, and finding it didn’t simply replicate the image of the seed but what it wanted to be when it grew up!
On each subsequent walk, I included the sea itself in my metta blessings and listened rather than spoke to it anymore. It offered no definite “do this” crystal ball response, more a fluidity and playfulness that seeped into what shape my next steps could take. I applied for anything and everything that felt fun from an artisanal bakery apprenticeship to hostessing on a hotel canal barge to scouting shore visit locations for river cruise guests to working as a ski chalet girl and more.
It was both an exciting and daunting few weeks imagining, researching, and interviewing for all those possibilities, and in the end my feet chose next steps for me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, dear readers.
As the holiday flat I was staying in had no WiFi and my roaming phone data was patchy at best, I walked to the local library for internet access every day through a nearby nature park. Ducklings, goslings, chicks, and even baby turtles had all just hatched, and observing their first clumsy steps and paddles encouraged me with my own.
And after the Easter weekend, park maintenance workers drained each of the three ponds in turn to remove harmful litter, silt, and overgrown algae. Fierce momma ducks squawked and stamped their outrage each morning, demanding to know where the water had disappeared to overnight. Even the park peacocks, geese, and swans joined in on their vocal protests! The workers bravely continued to shovel wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of debris irrespective of complaints and then refilled the newly-cleared basins with fresh water.
Not unlike emptying last month’s inner f*ck it bucket to give the Dharma room for a refill with fresh ideas and metta, baby ducklings and turtles splashed in and surfed gleefully the incoming currents.
When I spotted a vacancy for live-in staff for a walking holiday co-operative with properties in many of the UK’s most beautiful national parks, I applied without hesitating. Minutes after pressing the submit button, however, the library’s power cut out and everyone was asked to vacate.
On my return to the flat, I noticed the power was also out in all the local shops and cafés and that no one had a phone connection. Then I discovered my poor neighbors stuck in the elevator! It took several hours for an engineer to come help free them manually, and by that stage it was clear to all that there were nationwide power outages in both Spain and Portugal.
Everyone carried on regardless, and by the next day most everything was back to business as usual. Whenever I saw a stranger light up at finding their phone connecting again, all I could think of was those baby ducks and turtles making the most of their fresh water supply.
Not soon after, the walking holiday co-operative scheduled a video call interview and hilariously the best phone reception in the library was outside the public toilets next to the drinking fountain!
As I sat cross-legged in the corridor, hoping the angle of my screen wouldn’t give water a starring role in the conversation, I had to smile at the Dharma’s in-joke when the interviewer described the majority of their guests as retired widows and widowers taking their first solo steps after their bereavement.
The offer felt right, and they were keen for me to start as soon as travel back to the UK was possible. And while my feet protested at wearing socks after two barefoot months, it did feel good to lace up my hiking boots with a clearer sense of direction again.
Considering I had arrived in Spain wanting to press pause on life and do nothing but eat, sleep, and walk, it was heartwarming to realise just how many connections I had made despite my hermitage and limited Spanish.
There was the lovely soul who litter picked the beach every morning before anyone else arrived, the dreamer who stood in the surf for hours talking to the sea yet always stopped to smile at me when I passed as if it were a three-way conversation, the writer who shared his short story about a local man who could talk to seagulls, all the regulars I exchanged daily ¡holas! or friendly hugs with in passing, and the patient librarians entertained by my Google translate d-esperanto efforts.
Saying hasta luego to them all as well as the sea itself was a poignant reminder that no man is an island– especially when even the surrounding waters are keen to connect.
And so, dear readers, whatever growing up you may currently be undergoing, please stay both as fierce and as gentle with yourself as any momma duck with her hatchlings. What feels like an emptying out may well be making room for an upcoming re-fill of fresh ideas and metta for next steps.
Or, to metta-morphose Ellie Goulding’s song “Anything Could Happen:”
Stripped to the waist we fall into the river
Cover your eyes so you don’t know the secretLetting darkness grow
as if we need its palette and we need its colorBaby, metta will give you everything you need give you everything you need
But now I’ve seen it through
And now I know the truth
That anything could happen
Anything could
See more
The Living Language of Water: Veda Austin’s exploration and its relevance to modern society (Majorca Daily Bulletin)
Find a Spring
The Secret Intelligence of Water as the Liquid Language of God with Veda Austin: The Life Stylist Podcast episode #410 (YouTube)
The Shape of Water (movie trailer)
Veda Austin
Related features from BDG
Metta’s Sea Change
Resetting Our “New Year, New Me” Mindset
Understanding Non-duality
Precious Water, Precious Life – Speaking Up for the Natural World
