Celebrating Water

This is an educational holiday where people participate in activities to learn about the sources of water in our local environment, water conservation, and all things to do with water.

For example:

Learn about local water sources. Look at maps of the surrounding area to see where bodies of water are and where they flow. Look at both natural and unnatural pathways such as major pipelines and drainage channels. Visit some of these places.   

There may be displays of public art celebrating the beauty of water uniquely for this occasion.

Learn about where your water comes from in your area. Learn about how it is collected, processed, distributed, and where it ends up.

Learn about numerous ways water can be collected, cleansed, used, and how waste water is managed. Learn about both industrial technologies to small scale do it yourself methods, to camping and survival techniques for harvesting water.

Activities are designed to help form an understanding of our relationship with local water sources, and how we can improve that relationship.

In addition to exploring environmental and urban planning topics, the topic of proper hydration is also explored. The impact of dehydration on personal health is an important issue right now. 

Archetype Leaves

Choose Your People

Who are your favorite people? These are the people who cause you to naturally overflow with a sense of appreciation and positive intention just by calling them to mind. Build a list of people who evoke natural appreciation and compassion. Be careful to sense the minutiae of how you feel when you think about them. Be the curator of this collection which can include real people, fictional characters, and figures that reside in your own imagination. They will form the basis for an appreciation meditation in which you think about these people while breathing rhythmically and focusing your awareness into the area of your heart.

Charting Expansion and Identifying What Fuels You

The next part, which probably involves writing, is to chart a path of expansive growth you think that each person on your list would go through. Explore what qualities and skills they wish to attain and in what sequential order, where each expansion paves the way for the next. Each stage can be numbered sequentially or be given a title representing the nature of their identity at that point, like giving them a new name. At each stage something is gained and something is lost, specify what is gained and what is lost. Try to describe details about what changes the person undergoes at each stage.

 The other side of it is to give specifications about what is required for each person to reach the next stage. What are the experiences that charge and energize them? It does not have to be experiences that on the surface appear connected to them attaining the next growth. It just has to be any experience that is novel and energizing to them in that specific stage. In the next stage, the experiences/activities that they draw energy from will be different or modified to reflect how they have changed. Specify how much momentum they will need to build up, and how frequently they will have to do these things before they advance. Secondly, you will again do the same thing, only this time instead of looking at experiences and activities, you are look solely at relationships. What relationships, what kinds of people, are energizing to them at this stage? Thirdly, examine ideas and beliefs that give them momentum. What ideas and beliefs will they be utilizing in each stage that fuel them?

  If you know these people personally, you can build these lists with them. Otherwise you just use your imagination. Once this is laid out you can incorporate it into your appreciate mediation. Meditate on the idea of them going through these stages and having the experiences that charge them energetically. Explore in your imagination the idea of them being charged to the point of overflowing until they advance effortlessly to the next stage.

Mapping Your Future

 Create a map that is representative of the wilderness of your life. Each region of the map represents a specific stage of your journey that you imagine you will encounter, or would like to encounter in your most ideal vision. These regions have symbolic themes which reflect the nature of what you will experience there. While traversing that area, you will be forced to come to terms with, learn to love, integrate into the whole, a part of yourself which becomes exposed by the circumstances you face there. As a result you must explore what it has to offer and make sense of it. With this comes an understanding that the obstacles and choices you face have been put there to direct your path as you bend and alter your course around them. Thus in the process you are directed into the unknown.

 Draw possible pathways across this map that is a representation of the challenges you anticipate you will face in the months ahead. Wherever a major choice is made create a branch in the path. Create a loose script that sets up the interaction that will take place in each area. This will be a role playing game.

  With a one or more friends, you can visit each stage of the journey where they will attempt to present your anticipated scenarios to you as they understand them, filling in the details. They will ask you what you would do if this or that happened in this or that way, adding their own creative flair. You say how you would respond, then they counter your responses. In this way you explore the scenario until a satisfying conclusion is reached and you move on to the next area of the map.

   One way to do this is to create the map to correspond to real world locations, allowing you and your friends to walk to real locations to lend a more adventurous, atmospheric tone to the experience. The whole map can be tackled over time in sessions.

 The goal of this is to provide a fun way for you to work through ideas about where you are headed in life, a bring those who are close to you into the loop of that creative process. The more mysterious and beautiful the map, the more rich the experience can be.