Director Louie Schwartzberg has been exploring our waterways with his camera for more than four decades, showing us the healing power of Visual Healing with water imagery.
Have you ever heard of water meditation?
Millions of viewers around the world have relaxed with Louie’s very first episode of his Moving Art series, “Oceans.”
A few years ago, he created this gorgeous ocean meditation he made for the organization, 1% for the Planet.
Sweet Water Poetry
As we celebrate National Water Quality Awareness Month this August, we also highlight the voices of artists around the world who lead the way towards clean water for all.
Water is not only an element necessary to survival on Earth, but it is the substance that connects all beings to one another. Across geographic distances, across species, and across time, water connects us all.
Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds is a brand new poetry anthology that gathers the voices of poets from across Canada, the US and the UK who have written work inspired by water. “Bottled, clouded, held in rain, in river, estuary, and lake, sweet water is the planet’s life force and the poets here examine it from every angle,” states the editorial page.
In Laurie D. Graham’s poem “Antler River,” the juxtaposition between humanity’s reverence and disdain for nature is stark. The excerpt below speaks to the delicately fraught relationship between the humans and birds that share access to the river:
“Mallards and their escaped domestic kin and the bright,
rasping horns of Canada geese in false spring, in glacier-
turquoise water. Hundreds and hundreds of sharps sinking
into the banks.”
In this excerpt from “Parts Per Billion,” Canadian writer Joe Zucchiatti meditates on the generational differences in how his family handles water treatment in rural Ontario:
“the living water,
my uncle proclaims proudly, defiantly,
as if purified water
was only for sissies,
and impurity and pollution
somehow nutritious”
Solveig Adair, a scientist, teacher, and writer, contributes her poem entitled “Grandmother River.” The excerpt below calls into consciousness the oneness of all life, even after death:
before she died she
knelt in the river and when
I blinked there was no
distinction between her and
the water body
fed by veins and arteries
wild as water returning
always to the heart
Some writers contribute odes to the creatures who inhabit swamps, whereas others meditate on the destruction of waterways and the future of Earth’s ecosystems. As an anthology, this collection is the perfect way to honor National Water Quality Awareness Month.
It offers the special gift of presenting diverse and international experiences with different bodies of water, calling readers to engage with its themes and be moved into action. Water meditation is incredible! What is your favorite type of meditation?