Many of our ancient indigenous ancestors recognized the sacred waters of the living Earth as living beings, imbued with a spirit, and as such, deserving of the same recognition and respect as any of our other kin.

Within ancient Gaelic cultures the springs, rivers, lakes and wells were seen as beings that have a spirit and innate rights. Under their Brehon Laws (known in the Gaelic language as 'Fénechas) the Gaels (Druids and their Brehon successors) acknowledged the living waters of the Earth had innate rights just as all human beings did (including equal rights for women, which at the time was far ahead of any other European laws for women). The Brehon Law defined our Kinship with Water, our responsibilities to respect her and offer blessings and express gratitude when we receive her gifts.

In ancient Japanese animistic tradition, every natural phenomenon,including rivers, are believed to be inhabited by a spirit called a Kami. In Japan, blessings for water are associated with Shinto spiritual beings like Suijin and Ryūjin, and with waterfalls and springs.

Suijin or Mizugami (水神, すいじん, みずがみ) is a general name for the spirit of water in Japanese animistic mythology. The term refers to the heavenly and earthly manifestations of the benevolent Shinto divinity of water found in lakes, ponds, springs, and wells.

Many peoples of Turtle Island had similar traditions that spoke of the living waters in the rivers, steams, springs and oceans as their kin, and beings from which we can receive gifts, wisdom and should express our gratitude towards in different ceremonies.

Rather than build churches with walls that separate humans from the sacred inspiration and embodiment of Creator's design, many of ancient animistic indigenous cultures chose to recognize and/or create spaces for prayer, sacred ceremonies, knowing the will of the Divine and blessing rituals that were centered around flowing springs, sacred groves of trees and/or sacred wells.

People visited the springs and wells for their traditional virtues of healing and divination. In the time of the Druids and the Brehon, sacred trees of the Ogham were planted as both offerings to the water spirits and to serve as guardians of the springs and wells. If a physical cure was sought, the seeker would drink or sometimes bathe in the water. And in fact, the water of some holy wells have indeed been found to contain curative properties, mostly due to the presence of certain minerals. But the healing influence of the wells was due to more than their medicinal qualities. The well or spring itself was viewed as a shrine dedicated to the miraculous emergence of living water, in all intact indigenous cultures, it is a symbol of generation, purification, and the matrix of life itself. To quote Mircea Eliade, ‘…water symbolizes the whole of potentiality; it is fons et origo, the source of all possible existence.’

Spiritual qualities automatically cluster about the manifestation of such a powerful archetype. The holy wells of Albion (aka the British Isles) were, in fact, such popular places of worship in pre-Christian times, that the early Roman Church took great pains to stamp them out. But, as is the way with an insuppressible archetypal force, the forms changed while the essential mystery continued unaltered (becoming part of new traditions with quasi-Christian trimmings).

These sacred groves, sacred springs and sacred wells were tended reverently for millennia, in many cases becoming spectacular old growth forested habitats that simultaneously provided a space for ceremony, blessings and worship for connecting with Creator while also providing habitat for our non human kin and also protecting the waters. However, as was well documented in Fred Hageneder's book "The Spirit of Trees: Science, Symbiosis and Inspiration", the Christian church began an aggressive crusade to destroy these sacred groves, sacred wells and sacred spring sites in an effort to destroy the cultures of all peoples they deemed as "heathens", "savages" and "pagans" starting around the year 723 AD in Europe.

Traditional ethnoecological worldviews of many of the pre-christian animistic indigenous cultures described above had recognized a relationship between trees and rain (eg. indigenous peoples had, and have place based wisdom that taught how the trees invite and call the rain to them). As Zach Weiss pointed out in his recent R-Future presentation, those worldviews are now being proven to be accurate my modern day science.

Within the Druid tradition–along with many others–are full of stories about sacred waters. From the Chalice Well in Glastonbury to the invocation of the “Salmon who Dwells Within The Sacred Pool,” water was viewed as a being and it was a sacred responsibility to care for her in the traditions of my ancestors.

The legacy of the polar opposite of that ancient animistic indigenous worldview (which was imported here to Turtle Island by anthropocentric statist regimes and imported to Albion by other statist regimes in earlier centuries) involved/involves the systematic multi-generational brainwashing of the population to no longer regard the living waters as a relative, a being and kin deserving of reverence, but instead to view her as nothing more than a "resource" to be owned, extracted, commodified, bottled and sold.

Many centuries after the introduction of those imported anthropocentric worldviews regarding the sacred waters, many of us on Turtle Island (and elsewhere) no longer no the joy of being able to dip a cup into a stream, river or spring and drink safe living waters. Most of the living waters have been poisoned by governments and the corporations that dominate those subservient statist regimes and due to exploitative water extraction, diversion and hydroelectric misuse many of the living springs and wells that were tended by and assessable to people for millennia in these lands have run dry.

The statist regimes we happen to be born within are now very fond of talking about "sustainable development", yet the kinds of "development" they have been sustaining for centuries now have resulted in the poisoning of the rivers, the ground waters, the drying up/diversion of aquifers for power corporations and the poisoning of the Great Lakes. This trend of "sustaining" their toxic, anthropocentric and hubristic way of "developing" continues today in northern Ontario and Quebec where our government is greenlighting the destruction of over two hundred thousand hectares of pristine Boreal Forest, rivers and lakes for open pit lithium and cobalt mining (to meet their EV "sustainable" development goals). Hard rock lithium mining involves deforestation, draining lakes and rivers, blowing the land into pieces with explosives, carving deep gashes into the Earth with giant machines, using truckloads of industrial solvents like sulfuric acid (resulting in water contamination with toxic sludge) dragging that processed rubble to processing facilities with fleets of heavy machinery then processing the ore with extremely high energy furnaces using another slew of toxic chemicals (which further contaminate the water table, lakes, rivers and ocean elsewhere).

What I describe above is what results when we allow our energy to flow into systems of governance that are driven by anthropocentric worldviews and that should highlight the moral imperative of divesting in such systems and instead reviving the animistic ways of our ancient ancestors.

That is why I feel that creating Biocultural Refugia is so important and I feel that applying the concepts I discussed in my presentation on that concept in the context of creating sacred water sites for ceremony and prayer is an extremely important expression of biocultural refugia. Those of us that are blessed to steward riparian habitat, river banks and springs can plant the seeds for new Sacred Groves and co-create (and/or revive) traditions and ceremonies that honor and heal the living waters that we can pass onto future generations.

Some are working within the imported systems of law to grant bodies of water legal personhood (such as New Zealand’s Whanganui, United States’ Klamath, Colombia’s Amazon, Canada’s Magpie river) as a way to protect them using the language of modern western civilization and I admire their noble efforts, but I would also encourage us to each plant more decentralized seeds for cultural revival, creating new sacred groves, sacred spring traditions and helping these traditions to become an integral aspect of our local communities. In doing so, we plant the seeds for a multi-generational movement of love, tradition, courage and nurturing of these places to become a more powerful incentive to protect them than any government bribe or threat ever could provide.

This is a call to all who wish walk the path of satyagraha and use their time on Earth to heal our relationship with the land and the elements. I speak to those of you who wish to give your energy and time to nourish all life to thrive.

That is exactly what my presentation on Designing Biocultural Refugia is all about. I hope you will watch it, apply some of the concepts I shared and offer your own ideas for how we can plant the seeds of ancient animistic wisdom within our modern day communities to set down roots, heal our relationship with the living waters, the living soil, the oceans, mountains and tall rooted beings and so that we can become ancestors worth descending from.

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Cha bhi fios aire math an tobair gus an tràigh e.

(The value of the well is not known until it goes dry.)

-Scottish Gaelic Proverb