Talking Water
Talking Water is an offering by Walking Water ...
Walking Water, born from a vision received in Payahuunadü - "the place where the water flows" on the ancestral homelands of the Paiute-Shoshone people - is a project and a prayer that centers water as teacher, guide, and sacred source.
We began as a three-year pilgrimage along the natural and human-made waterways between Mono Lake and Los Angeles, CA, partnering with local and global communities to collectively bear witness to the situation of water in our world. Following the path of water from source to end-user, we witnessed histories and current realities of destruction, violence, harm and extraction. Alongside the stories of grief, we celebrated those of beauty and resilience - possibilities for the healing and regeneration of waters, landscapes, and communities.
We continue to listen to the guidance and orientation of water, for how Walking Water might serve as one tributary within a global and intergenerational movement to restore relations with waters, lands and peoples. We move with the question: what world is possible if human beings devote themselves - personally, politically, spiritually - to that which gives life? We understand how essential it is for us to recognize and honor the leadership of Indigenous peoples and communities of color who have been protecting the waters and the lands from extraction and exploitation for hundreds of years -whose life ways, languages and cultures offer profound teachings for how to grow into right relationship.
A commitment to healing waters asks each of us to find our role in movements that struggle to dismantle oppressive systems that commodify waters, lands and peoples in pursuit of power and profit. And as we carry the dream of justice for waters and peoples alike, we strive to uplift and support those individuals and communities who are "acupuncture points" of healing and possibility, actively living towards that more beautiful and liberated world.
For more info go to: https://walking-water.org
To support the work of Walking Water go to: https://walking-water.org/donate/
Walking Water is a fiscally sponsored project of Weaving Earth
Banner photo by Teena Pugliese
Talking Water
with Elizabeth K Nguyen, MD
“There are global water protectors all around the world committed to this work, and we need to do it together. We need to know there are others doing this work, so we don’t feel alone in the work, and know that we are connected energetically through the waterways, supporting one another…” -Elizabeth K Nguyen, MD
Elizabeth K Nguyen, MD, water keeper, psychiatrist, and author, joins Talking Water this month in a collaborative conversation with the Walking Water community. Dr. Nguyen shares her important work as a psychiatrist and energy worker supporting people to restore their internal bodies of water, freeing up the channels that block connection to self, place, and planet. The conversation widens into a community-sharing about the many ways people are doing the sacred work of protecting water on the planet and how replenishing and healing the internal waterways is both a support to environmental activism and a valuable form of activism.
Elizabeth K Nguyen, MD was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents were refugees from Vietnam who arrived in Honolulu in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War. She received her BA from Stanford University in Human Biology, her MD from Northwestern University, and her Psychiatry Residency and Child Psychiatry Fellowship training at UC Davis. She started her career in community mental health, with specific interests in cross-cultural psychiatry, the intersection of spirituality and mental health, and the healing power of water and the natural world. She is also the author of Aloha Vietnam and founder of the Water Keeper community.
Of the inspiration behind and the intention for Aloha Vietnam, Elizabeth says: "There is so much trauma and healing in the human ancestral lineages, and water, art, and storytelling help us in becoming whole and natural again. This book is my love offering to the land and the people of Vietnam and Hawaii, and the vast Pacific Ocean that connects them. It is my hope that it provides beauty and healing to the trauma and suffering that has come through generations of loss and the struggles of mental illness."
Produced & Edited by: Anne Carol Mitchell
Intro music by: Mamuse 'River Run Free' - featuring Walter Strauss
If you feel inspired by Talking Water please consider a donation - our work relies on the community. You can donate here.
For more info go to Walking Water website
