One morning last week I decided to do a candle meditation, instead of my usual "eyes shut" style. No sooner had I begun to gaze at the flame than I received this message/download or whatever name you want to give it. When it came to an end, I wondered whether I would be able to recall it to write it down, but that also seemed to be fairly easy. I am thinking about maybe recording it as an audio, later on. Let me know if you think that would be a good idea!

In honour of the Autumn Equinox, my partner, Mark, and I took a trip to Manitou Springs. We have been there a few times, but typical of people who are (sort of) local, we hadn't given the place much thought. It's a small mountain resort with nice boutiques and a good vibe, a fun change from our daily lives. It was only toward the end of our last trip that I noticed the Cheyenne Spring font on the main street, tasted the water, and all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in my head. "Oh, Manitou Springs!" So we decided to dedicate our next visit to finding and investigating the springs -- and bringing jars.

Although I remembered to take the jars, I forgot my camera, so the gallery of photos below are not mine. They are from other people's blogs and articles, or from the website of the local Mineral Springs Foundation, who produce a free brochure, including photos, a map, and an analysis of the mineral content or each spring. They have done good work in renovating and decorating many of the springs around the town, inviting a number of artists and sculptors to design fonts. The result is a great deal of variation in the ambiance of the different springs.

Back home in Scotland the "places of interest" seem to be so thick on the ground that you are tripping over them. Lots of wells and springs, ancient monuments and places of natural beauty. To me, it feels very easy to find places that help me to feel close to the gods, to the spirits of nature or people of the past. Yes, the trees and rocks and soil are sacred everywhere, but I feel less resonance here. I hoped that these springs might be a good place to feel something like that, but I'm not sure.

The town of Manitou happened to be rather busy when we visited, with some sort of festival going on. There was a very friendly and slightly crowded atmosphere, which I enjoyed, but it wasn't conducive to quiet moments of spirituality. At each spring we visited we ended up chatting to people. A few were locals, getting water from their favourite spring, and happy to tell us about its benefits. Most were other people "doing the tour", but hardly anyone liked the taste of the water. Except me. I thought some of it was excellent. Each spring varies quite a bit in its mineral make up, but most of them are naturally carbonated, and have a high mineral content, which I enjoyed. One or two would take some getting used to. Iron Spring, for example is rather salty tasting and with its high iron content, reminded me of the taste of blood. I particularly liked the taste of the water from Wheeler Spring, which was fizzy and refreshing, and has a more traditional style of font, too.

It must be the Druid in me, but I found people's jokes and face pulling about the taste of the water a bit frustrating. I find the stuff that comes out of many a household tap completely disgusting. I don't like many mainstream commercial beverages, either. What the earth was offering, via these springs, tasted so much better to me, but people seem to me to have lost their discernment. Too much soda-pop and Miller Lite, I guess. Visiting the springs was just a box to tick, and a funny story about how bad it tasted to be told later.

I haven't delved too deeply into the history of Manitou Springs. Manitou means "spirit" in the Algonquin languages. Spirit both in the sense of what we might call gods and of the spirits that inhabit all things in the animistic sense. Several local plains tribes, such as the Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples, held the area as particularly sacred and knew that the waters had healing powers. Because of the high mineral content of the water, some of the springs had formed natural mineral basins which were ideal for bathing. When European explorers found the area they quickly began to develop it as a spa, with great emphasis put on its healing potential and romantic associations with the local tribes. These settlers, too, valued the water, and the beauty of the area, but had rather different ideas about what was sacred.

Over the course of the 20th century the "spa" concept gradually gave way to a more general type of commercial tourism. The area has many tourist attractions, including Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods, and the springs at Manitou became a minor sideline which I don't even remember hearing mentioned. Manitou Springs became known for its enormous amusement arcade, cog railway and vast selection of motels.

Looking at the photos of Soda Spring, below, in 1870 and the present, I know which I prefer. However, I'm glad that perhaps something of the dignity and original reverence for the springs has been revived by the Mineral Springs Foundation. Water in Colorado is rarely a source of peace. It is generally seen as a scarce commodity, bought and sold for unsustainable agriculture, use by growing cities and for sporting and recreation. The saying "Whisky's for drinking, water's for fighting" refers to the legal wrangling that is almost always ongoing over water, somewhere in the state. Yet holy wells and holy water have gone unnoticed...

Because the town was built around the springs, most of them are along the main street or along major traffic arteries. The atmosphere when we visited this time, while pleasant, wasn't great for, say, a few moments of meditation. I would like to go back on a weekday in the off season, and see how it is then.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like The Divine Connection of Water and Mother Nepesta.

These photos can all be clicked to enlarge, and the captions link to their original sources, which are often quite interesting in themselves.

Tide rising, tide going out. Times of power and times of rest. More and more I'm thinking about the rhythm of my life - how to tie that in with the phases of the moon and with the wheel of the year. Sometimes our desire to bring new growth, new stuff and new adventures into our lives is very strong. Other times, it feels more important to get rid of some things. Negativity, pain, anger . . . you know. There are all kinds of techniques, spells, charms, or whatever you choose to call them, which can allow us to let go of things which aren't helping us. Have you ever thought about how the waning moon energy might help with that?

Dotted around the British Isles you can find trees, usually next to holy wells, called "clootie trees". In Scots a clootie is literally a cloth, whether a rag or an item of clothing. There is an old saying, "Ne'er cast a cloot 'til May is oot," meaning don't discard any items of winter clothing until the end of May, while a "clootie dumpling" is a pudding steamed in a tea towel or a piece of muslin. On these clootie trees you will see strips of cloth and ribbon, and even entire pieces of clothing at some locations, hung on the trees. These might be offerings of worship to some saint or deity, but at many trees the tradition is one of requesting the removal of illness or some other trouble. The idea is that as the cloth decays, so the problem will fade away.

I live in a very dry place where the chances of finding water at all, let alone a natural spring, are slim. However, I do have some beautiful cottonwood trees on my farm which have gotten their roots into enough water to grow very large. The energy around them is special to me, and without giving it much thought I spontaneously began tying the occasional clootie to them. Some are acts of worship, and others are requests to take things away.

While I know that it is traditional to work with the full moon, it is worth considering that it is actually only truly full for a moment, so I am trying something new, working with the waning gibbous moon. This time in the moon's phase is still bright and power-filled, but because it is also waning, I feel that the power of removal and decay is particularly present. If you have something that you want removed from your life, what better time to ask?

I like to write things on my strips of cloth. That might be the name of a deity - in which case I prefer to use something beautiful or precious like a favourite piece of ribbon, or it may be a word representing something I want to get rid of, in which case a strip torn from any old rag will do. Luckily, I'm in good health and I have not had to use this for illness, so I can't say what this kind of healing feels like for a physical ailment. In the case of other negative things I know that many of them are in my life because I resist letting go of them. This is particularly true with negative emotions and attitudes. What I seem to feel happening here is a kind of insistent reminder to work on the resistance itself, and perhaps a bit more resolve and strength to do that than I had before. If my clooties are aiding that process, then I think they are a great help.

You don't need me to walk you through this process step by step. If you like the idea, take it and make it your own. Do the things that will make it meaningful for you. Do what feels right. And may the waning moon assist you!

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like The New Moon another exploration of the possibilities of working with the moon.

I look at the words above, which form the definition of the card Well in the Go Deeper oracle, and I wonder what more there is to say. Water is such a wonder to me, in any form. To have it welling up out of the ground, unbidden, is surely a kind of miracle. I actually believe that all water is sacred - the dirty river, the stuff in a plastic bottle - even in all the places we fail to see the sacred, water is there. We are mostly water. The earth is mostly water. We may ignore, defile, dirty and desecrate the sacred, we may buy it and sell it and even imprison it, but it remains sacred.

Water is a divine connection. You only have to look at the myth of the well at the centre of the world, where the salmon of knowledge swim, where the hazel trees drop their purple nuts for the salmon to eat, to know that this is both a great metaphor and a truth that we understand instinctively as water beings. Every well is a tributary of the great well, and so it is natural for sacred energy, or sacred beings, to gravitate to these places, just as it's natural for humans and animals to do so. We are thirsty - but not just for H2O. Our souls are thirsty, too, as is our energetic body.

I'm sure you know that wells are associated with knowledge and wisdom, with healing, with divination and with the granting of requests. They are a place of power. Water that has been purified by the earth carries many important minerals. However, it must also have a special energy.  Just how powerful the energetic memory of water might be is getting more interest these days among scientists. The following documentary is long, and I would be the first to suspect that it contains a fair dose of pseudo science. However, I believe that nevertheless, these scientists are following what Einstein said is most important - their intuition. There is immense food for thought here, and I really recommend taking the time to watch this, even if you consider one part or another of the whole to be questionable.

Just in case you didn't watch the video right away, it features a number of scientists who are doing research into the memory of water. Into how the molecular structure of water changes when it is influenced by all kinds of different things. Everything from human emotions to music to modern forms of water transportation and treatment are considered, and a few religious scholars and philosophers add in their thoughts along the way. The video constantly reminds us that not only is our existence defined by water, but that we have an influence over it. Perhaps that's why positive thinking works -- or prayer, or holy water and holy wells.

We know enough about how our world works to understand that water circulates. It evaporates and falls as rain, it works its way into the ground and comes up somewhere else as a spring, it flows down the sides of mountains to end up in the sea, where the process is repeated in an ancient cycle. To some extent, the scientists in the film tell us, water cleanses itself of the negative memories it acquires through things like freezing and evaporation. It wipes the slate clean. However, this also made me think that when we visit a holy well, when we bless food or drink (even the food contains water) when we bless the earth and when we bless ourselves and each other - we have the opportunity to connect with the divine in a way that is similar to that physical circulation of water. If the water heals us, perhaps this is also because we help to heal the water. If we lavish love and care on the earth and on her well-shrines, and other waters, we become part of a circulation of healing, of wisdom and knowledge, of love and gratitude.

Of all the Pagan practices that have survived many centuries of Christianity in Europe, the veneration and recourse to sacred wells is high on the list. The Roman church found it easiest to create new, saintly stories around these places, and let the traditions continue in slightly modified forms, but even in Scotland, with its long history of protestant Calvinism and accompanying concerns about "idolitry", sacred wells survived, and are visited to this day. What we perhaps lost, to some extent, was the worship and veneration, the gratitude for sacred energy that completes the circle of divine connection. In the past few centuries, the cultural climate might have been willing to allow a visit to a well to ask a favour or to say a prayer, but to be seen to be actively worshiping there was not always safe. In this way, as we moved into modern times, I think our culture perhaps lost a little of the best these places have to offer. The awe, the reverence, the holiness of these places was slowly replaced by a sense of a transaction. A place to tie a clootie, throw a coin, leave a bent pin. I am not making light of any of these traditions per se, so much as saying that there is potential, without worship, love and gratitude, without a sense of the two way working of the divine connection, to lose our place in all this.

Further reading:
Sacred Waters - Holy Wells by Mara Freeman
Holy Wells in Ireland by Mary Ellen Sweeney