Back to the origins
November 30, 2018
Tempo de Leitura: 4 minutos

 

Patrícia Furtado de Mendonça is a researcher and co-creator of the 1st edition of Moon and Sun: ‘Back to the Origins’ – which will take place from 18th May to 2nd June 2019 in Arrábida (Mountain of the Sun) and Sintra (Mountain of the Moon), in Portugal, close to Lisbon – and she is one of the newest members of our Oceans and Flow team.

Today I share her testimonial about the water and the relationship she has been developing with this element throughout the last decades:

       Back to the Origins
       An invitation to reflection and to reconnection

       “Water is the origin of everything that exists”.Tales de Mileto

“Water is life. When we search for life on another planet, we search for water. Every seed or embryo begins its life in the water. It is the mean by which nature exists and sustains itself, connecting all living systems and linking the present to the past, and the past to the future. I see some kind of Ariadne’s thread that goes invisibly from my navel and connects me to the first living cell of the primordial ocean, crossing the spirals of time and space and connecting myself to the beginning of everything. In the opposite direction, going backwards, this thread gathers a series of life records that become a part of me. These waters of the past reach me, fill my cells and become memory, they leave indelible traces in my psyche, in the deepest and most obscure zone of my unconsciousness, and connect my history to your history and to the history of all mankind. We have a common past, and this ocean of memories binds us inexorably to one another. The waters that traverse and inhabit me are the same waters that traverse and inhabit each one of you, the waters of the beginning and of the end of everything, the waters of birth and death. What belongs exclusively to our individuality is just a drop of this immense ocean.

When a woman generates and gives birth to a child, she allows the sea of origins to overflow over the earth like a wave to irrigate a new world. The continuity of life is this primordial ocean that continuously flows out of each and every one of us.

Our bodies are literally flooded: a three-month-old human fetus is 94% water; a newborn, 75%; an adult, 60/65%; an elderly person, 40/50%. During our life journey, we gradually lose the waters of our body until we dry out definitively and become nothing more than dust.

Water and Ocean are subjects that will never fully come to an end. We are curious people, and the only thing we can do is to investigate and to dive, deeper and deeper, as far as the unreachable darkness of their abysses allows”.

 

This is how I conclude my lecture An Ocean of Memories: Waters that Traverse and Inhabit Us, which, to a certain extent, sums up the studies I have carried out at the beginning of the year 2000, in Italy, when I formally began my research on our Marine Memories and on the Memories of the Waters.

When Violeta Lapa asked me to prepare a text introducing the Moon and Sun: Back to the Origins journey, which will take place in Serra da Arrábida and in Sintra, between May and June 2019, I started to write many different things. But, in the end, I decided – me too – to go back to my origins. So, I decided to share this old text as a premise to reinforce some of the elements that will permeate our experiences there, but, regardless of them,  are a part of our life as a whole.

 

To come into the world, every human being inhabits the womb of a woman. We are born as individuals in the waters of our mother’s womb. This is why the feminine element holds such an important place in our lives. Water is the Great Mother, the first nourishment. It always arrives beforehand and welcomes us. It allowed the embryonic and fetal development of the egg cell we once were. It opened the way for our birth into the aerial and the terrestrial world, when our mother’s amniotic sac broke and spilled the liquid that had protected us before, telling the world that we were about to arrive.

Water is a creature, a living organism. It is the holiest element there is. It is much more than the resource that has been used and sold since the human being distanced itself from its own Nature. Unknowingly, we gradually lost our deep connection to the water and stopped seeing its connection to everything else in our planet that is alive and pulsates. Water is not only present in the numerous wild water bodies we see around us. Nor is it simply the domesticated liquid that reaches the taps of our homes or that is used in the production of everything we consume. Invisible to our eyes, it also circulates beneath the earth, inside the bodies of plants and animals, through the airs in the sky. It flows rhythmically into the many rivers and seas that navigate us, penetrates our inner forests and flows through the various fissures of our skin, whenever our deep emotions start to burn or when our life cycle is being renewed.

We have to thank and to be inspired by religions, cultures and traditions of communities and peoples that, despite modern times, have managed to maintain their ancestral and spiritual bond with the element that constitutes our very foundation. We urgently need to rescue that feeling. The same water that connects everything and everyone has also the power to reconnect us to the Mystery. It is a portal that gives access to dimensions that go beyond us. It is the guardian of all memories, a powerful vehicle that reconnects us with all of our origins.

Time flies in our world. We’re frequently under pressure. We are constantly pulled out from ourselves. With no roots in our own waters, we do not look back to the springs of the past. It is time to deeply reconnect with our aquatic origins – from the most distant to the most recent – and with the waters of other ecosystems that we are a part of. The waters are dying and they need us. It is time for us to vertiginously open up to a new perception of the water, to a new water culture. It is time to protect, to care for, to heal, to reverence and to honour the life of the element without which Life does not exist. In the direct contact with all of these waters, our consciousness, renewed, turns into action.

Yes, back to the origins. So we can make a difference in the future of those who will come after us.

by Patrícia Furtado de Mendonça

       Photography by Tatiana Guinle

 

Soon we will have inspiring news about our new journey Moon and Sun: ‘Back to the Origins’.

I send you my warmest wishes coming back from Brazil, where I’ve been immersed in another journey to the aquatic world. See you soon 🙂

Violeta Lapa