My love for healing water is the whole point for so many of the stories I tell and that I’ve told on the pages of Bella Magazine this year. The drops of healing water in my life are the moments of loving connection with others where I get the opportunity to share life with them, and they with me, with no strings attached. Some of these encounters this year have been a brief passing moment as I exchanged glances and a smile with someone, and other encounters have been for long chapters of my life that continue.
There are so many times in this chaotic year when I have felt the ping-pong balls of emotions that were battering me to the soul. The feeling of fear, even the small ripple of fear when I swallowed the “wrong way” and coughed and then thought, “Oh nooo, COVID?”, as my mind often wanders off and says things in slow motion. There have been personal joys and highlights of elation sprinkled through the year because of love or fun or music. There has been sadness and heartbreak and darkness too. And this year has been all the sensations in between.
But what if the meaning of life was really more like a scavenger hunt for experiences? And what if the moments of love that happen when we make connections of the heart with each other, what if those moments are the healing water that waters our souls?
In this year as I reflect back, there are so many of those points of connection that have happened in my life. There was that time when I met the same lady in the grocery store on five different aisles and I offered to invite myself to her house for dinner because I saw good goodies in her cart and we both laughed. I remember the lady who sat patiently in front of my porch as an officer pulled her to the side of the road with blue lights glowing and we shared a “Good Morning” and I hoped she felt the calming love I was sending her way. I remember the time when a neighbor who had wronged me brought me eggs, not a dozen but the 18-count. I remember the friends who held space and watched me cry with silence and a soft pat on the shoulder and the hugs. I remember the children who passed my way especially on the days that I had “good goodies” (this grandmother knows about GOOD goodies)! And as I try to remember each incident, knowing that I can’t, I realize all of those moments in my year, they were healing water to my very soul. They fueled me. They enlivened me. The opportunity to interact with others in love and others interacting with me in love — THAT is healing water. And that is the water I crave in my life.
I had a recent health battle with, of all things, dehydration. I had a talk with myself and said “Self, this dysfunction has a simple fix; water and you couldn’t master this?!” How did I get so far off track and how can I correct the issues? Water.
World, we have gotten off track. Our system, community, has been strained to the breaking point. My body’s safety mechanism threatened to shut me down from the overload that it was under as it tried to function without the very water that is essential. As I look around, are we forcing our social system, community, to buckle under the strain of pushing it to function more and more without the very critical healing water that it needs? Of course we are. And just like my fix was water, so I challenge you to consider that healing water may be the fix for what ails us to the core in our current way of existence. What if what we need is healing water — opportunities to give and receive love with no strings attached? And what if we lived life like a scavenger hunt, on the hunt for the next opportunity we can find to give love freely with no strings attached? What if that healing water would begin to heal us to the core, to the depth of our soul? What if?
What if one sip at a time we began to learn how to love more brilliantly? What if as we learn to love better we realize what healing water looks and feels like? And what if we figured out that it’s this healing water that revives and recharges us? What if we thirsted for those opportunities more and more? What if we valued those loving exchanges that occur, the ones that make us “feel the love” at our core when exchanging it with others? What if the human experience was about finding the opportunities to love? And what if we just did it? What if we loved? And what if those heart-to-heart loving exchanges between you and me were JUST the healing water that we all need.
My year has been full. I won’t leave it with thoughts of regret. I will leave it knowing I have had a flooding of healing water in my life this year and for that, I am grateful. Finding the things that fuel me, that excite me, that enliven me, that feed my soul, is a big part of my adventure called life. As we bring one adventurous year to an end, and as we embark on the new adventure called 2021, or “the year after THAT year,” let us search with earnest vigor for the moments in life that are like drops of healing water for our souls.
©2020 LaRahna Hughes, Used with Permission. Artwork used with permission.
