Dipping our toes in

Lately I’ve been having a lot of vivid, water-related dreams. This is not a euphemism for wetting the bed (or anything else related to that delicate region), by the way. Honestly.

The first one occurred a few weeks before Christmas. I was in a small boat, dangerously drifting over the waves of a turbulent sea. Someone was with me. We were both scared, but I seemed to be the one reassuring the other that we were going to be ok because I could see another vessel and people in the water in the distance. The waves carried us right to them and we were both rescued.

Then I dreamt about bobbing along on a lilo. Just me and the lilo in the open water with nothing else to do but bob along. That one had less of a story to it.

Most recently I dreamt I was almost drowning, swimming with all my might to keep my head above water in the trough of a tsunami-sized wave that was pulling me up into its crest like the mouth of a hungry blue whale.

The wave had me as well as a few other people and random objects, like cars, gripped in its jaws and was headed towards a huge concrete breakwater that was separating the sea from what looked like some post-apocalyptic city just beyond.

Again, I was with someone and seemed to be protecting them.

As the crest of the wave billowed above, getting close to fully subsuming us before it smashed down onto the wall, I looked at this person and we took a deep breath together. The next moment, it was dark.

That’s when I woke up, but instead of feeling utterly panicked, as you’d expect, I was actually overwhelmed by a sense of peace and trust for what being eaten by the tsunami wave would mean.

I’ve no doubt that my dreams have been hugely symbolic. It’s certainly fun and often quite revealing trying to interpret them. What dreams have you been having lately, I wonder?

Aside from what they may or may not represent, these dreams have got me thinking about the myriad ways that water can be a source of healing and strength.

Our Women Walking on Water project is about more than getting women out walking by water. It’s also about getting us to appreciate the water we have around us and think about the significant role that it plays in all our lives.

While we’re in the throws of one of the most turbulent times in living memory, perhaps we’d all do well to remember the powerfully healing and strengthening properties of this essential life-giving liquid.

Perhaps it would do us good to notice, to really notice, where it is, where it comes from, where it flows to and how it sustains us, from the crystal clear nectar that pours abundantly from our faucets, to the murky brown waterways that canal dwellers call home.

It might also do us well to think of all the ways we’ve managed to avoid drowning (in bad news, fear, discarded masks, conspiracy theories, financial worries, mortality rates, job losses, and so on and so forth) while we’ve all had to bravely dip our toes, and then our whole bodies, into this ‘new normal’.

As we look forward, I wonder if we can take the analogy further to see that diving into the waves of change that are on the horizon might not be as scary as it first looks, if we could only trust ourselves to tread the coming water with care.