Water is: the mist, the fog, the storm that leads us to the place where we may meet our Selves
About two years in to creating a private spa retreat, someone asked me to describe what had inspired me and how I set about it. I thought about everything I did in terms of water, so water permeated my description. Now, when I re-read that description, I can feel the passion I had then and the certainty that everything could be overcome, just as water eventually overcomes all obstacles!
As it happened, the venture did not succeed, though now I have come to see that neither did it fail. In fact it had reached the magical 5-year mark and was beginning to earn a good reputation, to be 'heard of'. Sadly, the challenges of living and working together in sole partnership eventually took their toll of my marriage partnership. Mist became fog became storm, and I was tossed out of the dream boat.
This blog is, in part, my account of swimming back to shore to tell the tale.
Or, as Martin Prechtel writes in The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, p. 86: 'If it was our love for a dream of peace that we followed to being blown-to-bits on the beach of Days, then it is the power of that shining dream that must put us back together again.'
Meanwhile, below are some unapologetically gushing extracts from my early writings on the above venture...
Like the ancients, I've been living in a dialog with water all my life. Water has provided both metaphor and meaning for making my way in the world. Most of all, it has reconnected me with my source.
When scientists look for signs of life on other planets, they look for water. Although we can do without food for up to three weeks, we can scarcely manage as many days without water.
Whether ocean or river, lake or pond, the water calls to us and reminds us of our dependence on it for both physical and spiritual support.
My story, I felt resembled the meanderings of a river to the sea, the instinct that is in all of us to search for right-livelihood.
The success of my venture would be nothing if it did not reflect the clarity and profundity that I hoped would arise from an appreciation of water.
If I could bring to others an awareness of the significance of this element, and through that a natural repugnance for anything that would pollute or otherwise dishonor it, then I would be very happy.
My first experience of Watsu (water shiatsu) in 1994 in England left a yearning to train that I did not achieve until four years later. Meantime, I taught myself to feel the world through my body - a new departure for a trained scientist. In the hot springs of Israel and South Africa, and finally California, I made discoveries about spirit through water that I could not deny.
As manager of the spa at a five-star English hotel, I had a taste of 'success and status' that I put aside in favor of deepening my passion for aquatic bodywork. I'd noticed that people of all kinds, whether Californian hippies or English gentry, forgot their masks in the water, and I was curious about that.
In a glittering paradise by the ocean in southern California, I had a brief honeymoon exploring this work with my then-husband. We began to build a business and soon came up against regulations that demanded large financial outlay. We questioned the future direction of our work and the best location for this.
A place in the Californian desert with natural hot water tempted us but the seller could feel our desire and matched it with his price. So we left the coast with its crowds of new luxury resorts, and headed inland. For six-months we traveled on a unspoken quest, reluctant water gypsies looking for a watering hole.
I started to write a saga of ancestral and mythological proportions in the hope that it might somehow draw the help of the spirits to us. We stayed with dear friends (Dot and Albert) in the Ozarks, while rain storms raged about us: Missouri or misery. One day, still resistant, we drove out to a log cabin that was for sale.
Standing in the hall of wood and light beside a flashing stream, I heard the land call me and my spirit began to flow again. The local bank gave us a loan on the spot, promising more for business development. We exchanged contracts on my birthday in July of 2002. Aquaest Retreat found its home ground.
No market research, no knowledge of our newly adopted homeland, nothing to go on but that call from the land and some dreams that would need modifying to suit new territory. I sank all my savings into a endeavor that neither family nor friend could call anything but crazily courageous.
While I created a website and marketing plan, my ex-husband spent the winter months battling ice and snow to build a bath house of log. No development loan was forthcoming and our neighbors had turned the quiet valley into a mining operation.
I persisted with a 'business plan' that was far from conventional. Limited by funds but not imagination, we faced every test and there were plenty. Our new marriage and our unproven venture were thrust into rough white water. We had everything to lose, except our commitment.
The vision spa retreat was conceived in response to a concern that big business would soon take the real water out of spa, that some people would see that the emperor wore no clothes. Although I had a grand plan, I knew it had to grow in a natural response to the seasons and cycles of the place and the time.
The help and the resources needed seem to come just on time, so long as we were willing to stay alert to the shifts in the currents. Turning up for 'work' every day, when there was no one to tell us what to do or how to do it, threw us back on knowledge we didn't realize we had.
We had to make things work by balancing the very practical with the very creative.We had to learn to appreciate our individual skills and to help each other rise to whatever might seem impossible before it's begun. It was an invigorating challenge.
I had no aspirations to expansion beyond whatever allowed me to offer my personal best. If living on some twenty acres of ancient and still-strong land, refreshed by live water, allowed me to hear what the natural world had to say to humans about their needs and responsibilities, then what more ambition need there be?
I wrote then:
To those who are inspired by this venture, I can say: follow a passion that celebrates life, value innate skills more than any training, do not be seduced by status or the superficial, look for your signs of calling and affirmation in nature, expect the right support to come at the right time, be grateful for the limitations that check inappropriate expansion, realize that none of it comes from your own powers except so far as you have been able to tap into a universal source.
I'd still say that but add ...
Water is: the mist, the fog, the storm that leads us to the place where we may meet our Selves
To read more about the challenge of meeting our Selves please visit my second blog: Diving Deeper.
These are some of the experiences that gave me the foundation that I share through my spa consultancy service.
If you are interested to know more about any of the above, please write to me directly or add a thought below.
