Where can I begin to tell a story about water? Like water, this story cycles, around and around, with no one starting point. Like water, this story flows in many directions, changing from one state to another - liquid, vapor, crystal. Like water, this story is fluid and takes the shape of any container.
Over the last week or so, I have been doing a spell about Water, about Healing, about Sustainable Prosperity. These things are all really one thing. The spell is for Avalon Springs, for myself, and for the entire Biosphere of the Earth. These things are all really one thing.
This spell, like a drop of water flowing down a windowpane, touches and coalesces with other spells, rituals, experiences.
In 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had just happened, the Bloodroot Honey Priestess Tribe (at that time known as the Amazon Tribe) did a ritual for the healing of the Ocean. At that ritual, we poured water from different sources into one basin, gave the water a powerful healing blessing, and then invited all of the women present to take home some of the water, continue to do their own healing prayers and spells over the water at home, and ultimately pour the water back into the Ocean.
Later that Summer, my dear friend and Sister Priestess Amata Maia, who is also a member of American Magic Umbanda House, was formally headwashed to Yemaya in the Umbanda tradition. This dedication ceremony is a joyous community ritual followed by an all-night vigil, where the newly headwashed devotee is tended by dear friends. Although I am not a member of this tradition, Maia chose me as one of her attendants, so I got to share this deeply transformational event with her. In the morning, we went to the beach in Alameda to make offerings to Yemaya, an Orisha of the Ocean. I brought the water which I had taken from the Amazon ritual, and as I poured water into water, I prayed for the healing of the Ocean, and I also felt the need to pray for healing in the lives of some friends of mine who were going through hard times, and for my own healing around water and the flow of my life. I was uncertain about whether it was appropriate to divide my prayers in this way, rather than focusing them in one powerful and selfless beam on the Ocean, which had suffered such terrible insult and injury. The water answered me, and told me that there was no division in my prayers, because All Water Is One Water, and therefore All Life Is One Life and All Healing Is One Healing. This understanding became one of the fundamental truths underlying my personal practices, and as I have carried it with me in all my work with CAYA, it has also become the theme for the 2013 working of The Mothers Of The New Time: http://www.cayacoven.org/motnt/index.html
Since that day, I have adopted the personal practice of collecting water from one place, working with it, praying over it, sharing my magic with it, and then pouring it out in another place. I have come to realize that I have been doing this all my life, because indeed, life is a process of water moving from one place to another, being carried in the vessels of our own bodies. The water which is in my body now has spent time in many other bodies, and in many bodies of water, and it will continue its endlessly cycling journey through many more bodies, on and on into the future.
My first dedication is to Sulis Minerva, Goddess of the healing spring at Bath. When I discovered her, I knew that she was the key to all of my practices. My life is about water and the healing that it brings by flowing, dissolving, coalescing, cycling through every place and every state of being. I know that one day I will make a pilgrimage to Bath and commune with Her Water, even as I know that I am always connected to Her because All Water Is One Water.
Now, the story, like water, abruptly changes state.
In 2009, when CAYA was planning our first Harvest Home Festival, envisioned as a public weekend camping event with rituals and performances and workshops, I was doing research on possible locations for such an event. That was how I found out about Avalon Springs, still in its embryonic stages, and knew that in the future it would be the perfect place for such an event. The more I learned about Avalon Springs, the more I felt a deep connection between that intentional community’s work and the work of Come As You Are Coven. Like CAYA, the people of Avalon Springs embrace and invite diversity of ideas and practices even as they agree to come together to create their shared vision.
Avalon Springs has their Field of Alliance:
CAYA has a vision of creating an intentional community on our own land, and Avalon Springs is already building a model for just such a community, which will also be a resource for the public to come and experience the healing and inspiration of a land revered as sacred, tended by people working together for the highest good of all. From the beginning, I felt certain that Avalon Springs would play an important role in the future of CAYA.
In 2010, that same eventful Summer of Water, I had the opportunity to visit Avalon Springs. A community member named Melissa gave me a tour of the grounds, and when I told her that I was a Priestess, she said “You have to drink from the Yoni Spring!” She showed me a rock face where water flows out from a Yoni-shaped opening, with a Tantric Goddess shrine in front of it. I filled my water bottle from the spring and drank the wondrous water, which, as promised, tasted like fizzy lemonade! I had a specific personal, transformational, healing, magical experience with each of the several springs which I got to drink from or bathe in at Avalon Springs,
but the one which had the deepest personal resonance for me was the Dragon Spring, which looked exactly like the pictures I have seen of Aquae Sulis
(but with fewer Roman columns). Bathing in that iron-rich water felt exactly like total communion with my Goddess. I could have stayed there forever.
As the tour continued, I witnessed the present state of Avalon Springs while learning about its amazing past and even more astounding future. The miracle of all the different healing waters in one place, the evident sacredness of the land, the history of the original resort which was popular for over 100 years, the way the place had been preserved by a stubborn relative of the most recent resort owners until he finally decided that he had found someone he could trust to take over stewardship of the land, were all wonders to me.
The way it was when I experienced it, with the organic garden smelling like cocoa mulch, the wonderful home-grown lunch featuring the best strawberries of all time, the mix of still-functional old buildings and well-planned newer additions, such as the experimental cob house (my fascination with cob buildings and the role they will play in the future of CAYA is a whole story in itself) http://www.livingearthstructures.com/photo-gallery ,
was already a dream come true.
But the vision for the future of Avalon Springs really made my jaw drop. “This is where we’re going to daylight the creek which is now running under the driveway, we’re building an egg-shaped dome over the Boron Pool to make it more like a womb, there’s where we will plant the food forest, on the hill we’re creating an artificial lake which will be a source of water for the fire helicopters for this whole region, and there’s where the labyrinth will be laid out right next to the recording studio…”
A lot of things would be changing in beautiful ways, but more important was what would be staying the same. This land would be loved, revered, tended, stewarded, preserved, and shared, on and on into the future. The intentional community at Avalon Springs would run it as a resort open to the public, but always with an eye on teaching reverence and sustainable living. There was even a plan for a sort of ecovillage time-share, so that anyone who really wanted to share in an intentional community but could not do it full-time, or needed to learn by experience before creating a new community, could live there by the month. Again I felt the conviction that Avalon Springs would play an important role in the future of CAYA.
Three years and a lot of joyful service later, many of those plans for the future have already been realized in the present, the New Now. But over those same years, investment capital to fund the projects has been harder and harder to raise. Right now, the continued future of Avalon Springs is at at a crucial juncture - in order to continue to create a sustainable future, Avalon Springs needs to raise a large sum of money right away, in the present! A sudden change of state could take this story one way or another - it could continue flowing, bringing blessings which will be carried far and wide, or it could just evaporate and be lost forever. The history of Avalon Springs is a history of miracles. Now is the time for the Miracle of this Moment! Here is the link to the Indiegogo campaign for Avalon Springs:
The campaign is running until September 10. Since I heard about this situation, I have been torn between the urgency of getting the word out fast and the necessity of getting it right, clearly communicating how very important this is to me, personally, to CAYA, and to all who revere the Land and the Water as Sacred. I have been taking some time to work my water spells and to compose this message with care, to tell this deeply important and far-reaching story. I have been visiting local bodies of water, combining all of the Waters I have in my keeping, imbuing them with all of the Blessings I know how to give, and pouring them forth into all of the Streams of my home to carry them to Avalon Springs, for the Highest Good of All. Today, I am pouring my own money into the pool. Today, I am sending out a stream of communication to connect with many sources of funding.
May the Blessings Flow In, Well Up, and Rain Down!
Please pour your own Blessings into the Stream of Support which is Flowing and Growing. Please add your Magic, adding the Power of your Spells to the Power of my Spell. Please add your Streams of Communication, sharing this information on your social media and with anyone who will resonate with this Magic, getting this message out far and wide, going everywhere as Water goes everywhere! Please pour in a measure of your own Money if you can! May Magic, Communication, and Money all Flow forth and Flow into Avalon Springs, sustaining the Blessings of this Community On and On into the Future!
I call upon every drop of Water in your Body to conspire with every drop of Water in my Body to join Forces with every drop of Water flowing through Avalon Springs, to call in a Stream of Sustainable Funding, ever Flowing and Growing, to Support the continued Sacred Stewardship of the Land and the Water!
All Water Is One Water!
And so it is.
Pouring Forth Blessings,
Wishbringer Molly Blue Dawn, High Priestess of Serendipity
Thank you for sharing about this wondrous place, of which I had never heard about until this New Now. It is easy to see the merits of this intentional community and the sacred land it stewards. Let the funds flow abundantly, and may the highest good be served for all. Blessed be.
ReplyDeleteConfluently, Jaina Bee