Like Water

Once I had a recurring vision of myself free-falling through a deep, endless, dark well—a vortex pulling me down. I sensed cold water swirling beneath me, and panic rose in my chest like rising floodwater. I felt certain the well went on forever, that I would be continually drawn into it with nothing to hold on to. This feeling, this image, returned whenever I felt untethered or alone, as if I were falling headfirst through my own life.

I carried that image for years. It haunted me the way our deepest fears often do, becoming louder whenever life grew heavy. A few years ago, when everything I relied on suddenly crumbled, the vision returned with startling clarity. On one particular night, in the darkness of that collapse, as the walls of my life seemed to press inward, there it was again: the well, the free-fall, the cold rush of nothingness. Nudging its way through the turmoil, a quiet thought arrived: I can’t change what’s happening…but I can change how I meet it.

Lying there in the dark, my daughter sleeping beside me, I closed my eyes and softened the image. I shifted the churning, bottomless well into a gently babbling brook. In my mind, I lay down beside it and listened to water flowing over smooth stones. Gone was the whooshing between my ears. For a moment, I felt held. Safe. When I opened my inner eye, the scene expanded: moss and tiny flowers, the hum of insects, birdsong, a deer grazing between the trees, the ground teeming with life. I built this vivid landscape of quiet possibility to replace the helplessness of free-fall. Each time the well returned, I steadied my breath and changed the scene.

It was from this steady place of possibility that I was able to examine my fear more closely and it made all the difference. Where did this well of fear come from? What was it trying to teach me? How could I stay grounded and calm when life felt chaotic, without checking out?

This was a turning point, a recognition that I could transmute emotion, shift my own perception, and create safety for myself from within.

And over time, it invited a deeper inquiry into water as archetype. It has been helpful to contemplate the shape of water, and to allow myself to flow into the embodiment of its elemental qualities:

To be gentle and held in the soft babble of a brook.

To imagine myself as a rushing river, transforming and shaping everything it touches.

To see myself in the calm surface of a pond, a mirror that reminds me who I am.

To be water pooling, a living substrate for potentiality.

To understand myself as a drop in the ocean, indistinguishable from the greater whole.

To feel myself become a powerful wave, cresting and crashing, taking up its rightful space.

We all have this power. When we can let go, even a little, of how we think things are, we can begin to envision ourselves and our circumstances differently. We can learn to meet our fear with curiosity and imagination, to shift the landscape within. And believing in this power matters.

I remind myself that softening the way I see things takes courage. It is a constant re-vision, even when fear is present, especially alongside it. In this season of the water element, how will you see yourself? How will you make space for your capacity to flow, to reshape, to rise?