Celebrating Earth’s water can inspire us to find the flow in life.
© Rayna Bevando

Personal & Cultural Beliefs About Water

In this high-heat, high-stress summer, how are people finding relief? Emails from friends around the world offer a common response.

• “. . .the great thing about the island is that you’re almost always in sight of the sea.” —Waiheke, New Zealand
• “ . . .it’s cold getting in, but your body soon adjusts, and you feel your mood lifting with the waves.”—Cork, Ireland
• “ . . .in the evenings, we stroll, following the flow of the Arno and stopping at bridges to admire the reflected city.”—Florence, Italy

As we look out on blue spaces, we reflect inwardly, too.
© Joyce McGreevy

Our cultural beliefs about water may differ, but our need for blue spaces is both universal and deeply personal. Obviously, water is essential to our survival and that of the planet. As many a marine scientist has pointed out, without blue space, there is no green space. But water also buoys well-being.

This Theory Holds Water

According to the “Blue Mind” theory made famous by U.S. scientist Wallace J. Nichols, spending time near, in, or on bodies of water is a highly effective way to wash away what he calls “Red Mind,” an edgy state “characterized by stress, anxiety, fear, and maybe even a little bit of anger and despair.”

Like when, say, pandemic challenges your physical health, and turbulent world events challenge your mental health. Stuff like that.

A Deep Dive into Water

While the science behind water’s benefits to the brain is recent and ongoing, the history of why human beings celebrate water goes back to ancient cultural beliefs and traditions.

Indian and Chinese philosophers believed that the ideal state of being was exemplified by still water—quiet within and undisturbed on the surface. Lao Tzu advised, “Make your heart like a lake, with a calm, still surface, and great depths of kindness.”

No one said this was easy. Then, as now, daily life was regarded as a flood tide of constant change, what one Roman poet called a “rushing torrent of passing events.” The challenge was not to drown in despair but to learn how to ride the waves.

Ancient Roman and Greek physicians believed that water itself had healing properties for the body. They documented every conceivable kind of Water Cure.

Even a rivulet can fill the senses.
© Joyce McGreevy

Some ill-conceived water cures almost became cultural traditions, too. In early-1900s America, a fad for drinking radioactive water proved short-lived. (Alas, so did its more ardent practitioners.)

Got Water? Why Every Culture Celebrates It

Some believe our celebration of water goes back to our nine-month voyage in the amniotic cove of our mother’s womb, or farther back still, to our evolutionary emergence from the sea. Scientists are fond of pointing out to us that water not only covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, but also makes up from 45 to 75 percent of our bodies and more than 70 percent of our brains. Even our bones are one-third water.

We must go down to the sea again . . .
© Joyce McGreevy

Novelist Tom Robbins expressed the playful belief that “Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.” With all this water in our bodies, we humans have certainly carried water everywhere, including from one cultural celebration to another, finding ever more creative ways for it to flow into music, festivals, and language.

For example, long before Handel composed his Water Music suite, one of the world’s oldest musical instruments, the hydraulis, was powered by water.  The popularity of this ancient Greek pipe organ reached its zenith in the 17th century, when Italy’s Tivoli Gardens featured a 20-foot high instrument played by . . . a waterfall!

An orchestra of waterfalls performs arpeggios of water music.
© Joyce McGreevy

Water festivals have flowed through every age and culture, from Tōrō nagashi, the Japanese ceremony of floating paper lanterns down a river, to today’s global celebrations of World Water Day.

In Thailand’s Lo Krathong festival, cares, worries, and bad karma are symbolically floated away on a tiny candle-lit raft, or krathong, courtesy of the closest body of water.

In Armenia, July’s heat sets the scene for Vardavar, or “Rose Day.” According to tradition, people playfully douse any and all passersby with water. For tourists walking under open windows, Vardavar brings whole new meaning to “bucket list” travel.

Water Words

Water also channels through the idioms of different cultures. In English, someone who blurts out a secret is “letting the cat out of the bag, but in Nepali, they’re “letting the water leak.” In English, you might refer to multitasking, but in Indonesian you say, “while diving, drink water.”

Translated into English, the well-known phrase “like water for chocolate” sounds almost soothing. But in its original Spanish—estoy como agua para chocolate—it means your emotions are about to boil over. In the Irish language, the most intoxicating expression involving water is uisce beatha (ISH-kuh BAA-haa), “the water of life”—otherwise known as whiskey. Cheers!

Like a Fish to Water

My personal obsession with water is lifelong. Wherever I’ve lived or traveled, I’ve gravitated toward water —California’s Monterey Bay, Chicago’s Lake Michigan, Istanbul’s Bosporus strait, Galway, Ireland’s River Corrib.

Even now, in the high desert of Oregon, water is my favorite escape from workday deadlines and dire headlines.

Evening walk along the Deschutes River, Bend, Oregon.
© Joyce McGreevy

Calm waters offer respite. When life’s stresses become so layered that we bow under their earthen weight, blue spaces call to us. At such times, says poet Mary Oliver, we need

“to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even

to float a little

above this difficult world.”

Bluesday, Waterday . . .

Which is why—with work stacked up and the world pressing down—I declared a personal water festival. My sister, niece, and I—all water signs, naturally—got our feet wet testing a 4,000-year-old cultural tradition that’s now a popular summer diversion.

We went kayaking.

Floats and boats at Elk Lake, Oregon.
© Joyce McGreevy

For a few blissful hours, we paddled the clear waters and lush silence of Elk Lake. Trailing our fingers in the wavelets, we verified Wordsworth’s belief that “a lake carries you into recesses of feelings otherwise impenetrable.”

On a less literary note, I don’t know who said, “Time wasted at the lake is time well spent” but they were right. In a blue space, with a blue mind, I let everything but the present moment drift away on the current, as if on a candle-lit Krathong festival raft.

Water refracts yet clarifies, spotlighting the beauty of ordinary sand and stone.
© Joyce McGreevy

Now don’t get me wrong. As I returned to the land, I knew that life’s realities would be waiting for me. Not every day can be a water festival. But whenever the tides of life turn choppy, it helps to remember there are harbors.

Whatever our cultural  beliefs about water, we can all benefit from deepening our appreciation of water. Oh, I see: Our celebrations of blue spaces can help us navigate life’s rockier passages—perhaps even with blue minds, and hearts as calm as a lake.

Explore Japan’s cultural tradition of Tōrō nagashi, here.

Follow a dazzling history of Greenlandic kayaking, here.

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