The Water Remembers

Some journeys feel as though they began long before we can remember, their origins not always clear, yet quietly present. There is a sense, at times, that something has been moving through us for years—guiding, shaping, calling—long before we understand its meaning. Perhaps it is not so much that we are seeking something new, but that we are being drawn back into a thread that has always been there.

And perhaps it is only when we begin to follow such a thread that we realise where it has been leading all along.

I recently returned from the deep blue of the Pacific. I have been home a little while now—long enough to land, but not quite long enough to feel fully separate from what was. Some experiences do not end when you return. They continue to move quietly beneath the surface, like a current still finding its way.

There is a part of me, of all of us, that I have come to recognise as the intuitive self, guiding from within. It does not speak in instructions or plans, but in quieter ways—a nudge, a feeling, a sense of “follow me… follow this.” I do not always know why I do something, only that I feel beckoned. It was like that before I left. There was a sense that I needed to do something, something devotional in nature, a ritual to honour what felt like a call that had been present for decades. I did not have a plan in the usual sense, only a feeling that I was being drawn—not simply to a place, but into something.

I remember standing by the river here on Exmoor on the New Moon—the Solar Eclipse, the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Fire Horse. I had with me three small glass bottles. Quietly, I asked the river, not entirely knowing why, only that it felt important to receive, to collect some of her water. It was a simple act, a quiet beginning.

There has always been a part of me that feels at home in water. I have always loved swimming—playing, diving, moving like a seal, in and out, over and under.

I was about twelve years old when I bought my first piece for my room. There was a poster shop—Athena—in the arcade at High Street Kensington underground station, and without hesitation I chose a photograph by Bob Talbot: a whale diving, its great fluke lifting to the heavens. I would lie on my bed and look at it for long stretches of time, not really thinking, just feeling. Something in me recognised something, though I could not have said what.

The same image still hangs in my gong room. I have carried it with me ever since—at times even defending its place in certain homes, without fully knowing why.

And then, all these years later, I found myself in the water with them. Not imagined, not distant, but there—close enough to feel their presence not only around me, but through me.

There were moments I will never quite find words for: a mother and her calf moving together in a way that felt at once intimate and vast, and a stillness beneath the surface that seemed to hold everything. One morning, as I dived below, I heard their song—not through speakers or recordings, but carried through Grandmother Ocean herself.

At some point, without fully realising it, the thread that had begun years ago was no longer a longing. It had become an experience.

And woven through all of this was the water. The water I had brought with me. The water I offered at the crater of Kīlauea—barefoot, quietly, with no words prepared, simply as I am. Later, more water was offered, this time to the ocean, followed by a pause, a waiting to receive in return. Dolphins moved close, and there were moments of connection that felt both simple and extraordinary.

Just before the Spring Equinox, I returned home, back to the same river, to the same place. There, I offered the water of the deep blue Pacific back.

It was a simple gesture, and yet in that moment something in me recognised that the circuit had closed. Not in a dramatic way, nor as the completion of something that had been missing, but as a quiet knowing that nothing had ever been separate.

Alongside this, something else came into awareness. A younger part of me—the one who had longed, who had felt deeply, and who had learned, at times, that she could be both too much and not enough. Too sensitive, too open, too… something. And yet, in the vastness of the ocean, nothing needed to be reduced. Nothing needed to be quieter, smaller, or more contained. Everything belonged.

I did not find something out there. Not really. If anything, something softened. There was a sense that what I had once felt as lack or longing was not pointing me away from myself, but back toward something already known—something simply forgotten.

And perhaps this is what I am sitting with now, gently: what calls to us across the years is not something we lack, but something already within us—quietly waiting to be seen and recognised.

Perhaps it always was.

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