water, ritual purity, immersion
i dream of water: being immersed in water, water running down my hands, water washing away the miasma of my life.
when i first began honoring the greek gods, i dutifully mixed tap water and salt, lit a bayleaf on fire, doused it in the water, and sprinkled it over my head and neck in my mother’s bathroom. khernips. this would wash away the miasma, and i could approach the theoi with clean hands, with a clean heart.
yet i felt silly, and the droplets would crust over on the mirror, and my mother would later yell at me, ask me what on earth i’d been doing in the bathroom. i looked at the burnt particles of the bayleaf floating at the bottom of the bowl and thought to myself, this doesn’t feel very clean.
i no longer sprinkle myself with khernips when i approach the theoi. instead, i wash my hands, rinse my mouth, and cover my head with a scarf. i dream of lustral water that dances with light, sparkles with purity, as clear as water taken from the mouth of a spring. it is not the khernips of hellenismos. it is something entirely different.
my world is not made of salt and sea, rocky crags and mediterranean winds. my world is of appalachia, shadowed by endless trees, free flowing rain and landscapes carved by more creeks, streams, and rivers than one could ever imagine.
i read, enviously, of the jewish custom of mikveh, dreaming of a space where i can go and wash away my own impurities, and emerge, cleansed. i know this is not the complete picture of what mikveh is and what it means to the jewish faithful, but i long for the feeling of stepping slowly into water, thinking of the blessings i have, thinking of that which i want to cut away from me, to be made holy by the embrace of living waters.
it occurs to me that my heritage, hinduism, or at least the hinduism given to me by ethnicity, time, place, and caste, has a rich and storied symbiosis with water as well.
i think of gangajal, the water from the river ganges, flowing from the tresses of lord shiva’s hair. i think of the penitent and the holy, immersing themselves in the banks of rivers, in temple pools called theertha, prayers on their lips, seeking release from the cycles of this world. i think of ganesh chaturthi, how statues of ganesh are immersed in water to release him back to his heavenly abode; of how both the sacred and profane are carried away, whether through the disintegrating clay of statues, or the ashes of our bones after our deaths, into the water, by ganga, and into the life beyond. i think of the way the priests at the temple offer water as prasad, spiced with saffron, and cardamom, and how the remnant droplets after i’ve drunk are passed over my hair as a blessing. i think how eagerly i’ve always bathed the shiva lingam at the temple, how lovingly i’ve accepted the water flowing from the yoni, and touched it to my throat, my lips, and my forehead.
i am in the united states, and there are no temple pools for me to immerse myself in, no holy rivers beloved by communities over millennia, no worship of the water itself. here, i make jokes about how our rival city has a river that once caught fire, how if you jump into the monongahela river, you’ll grow a third limb, how ew i would never swim in the ohio river... further west, the indigenous guardians of the land and water we occupy fight for their right for clean water.
i think of what has been taken from me, growing up in the west. i think of how the allegheny, monongahela, and ohio rivers would be deified, as though goddesses like ganga, yamuna, narmada, or whether they would be more like river nymphs. i wonder what the indigenous peoples of the area saw these rivers as, because the peoples who lived here were not static, and some of them have been long lost. i wonder what it would be to worship and honor our three rivers, in their way, in my way.
we slip into the waters of the allegheny river, and the silt on its banks grabs us, holds us. we fight to cross the threshold into swimming in the allegheny’s waters. though we have swimsuits on, being in a river we never think of unless we’re crossing a bridge carries with it its own kind of nakedness, a re-imagining of what it means to be in pittsburgh, which sparkles just around the bend of the allegheny. above, meteors streak the sky, and we cheerfully keep count of the ones we catch sight of. i try to swim out to the 40th street bridge and am caught in the wake of a passing boat instead. i’ve never felt this deeply connected to my city.
in a lake, lake norman, under a new moon, four of us swim, old friends, each other’s found family, dressed in nothing but each other’s laughter. i am being carried on the back of a man i love but cannot be with; we silently take joy in the feel of our skin against the other’s. i bury my nose in the back of his neck. he squeezes the back of my thigh, in acknowledgement of what is passing unsaid between us. his long-term partner and my best friend are treading water in the distance, giddy with the joy of skinny-dipping in a wine-dark lake. i love him so much, and the warm water lapping at my feet remind me it’s okay to love him, still.
in yet another lake: i ask some friends -- friends i haven’t known for very long, treading in the brisk, late summer waters of skaneateles lake, bathed in only the silvery light of the almost full moon -- ask them what they wanted to let go of, and in the rough ebb and flow of the waters, pushed and pulled by the moon, we let our insecurities and self-hurts be taken away. nothing changes between us, but i feel closer to them, as though we’ve glimpsed each other’s spirits.
as the summer ends, i will dream of being in the water with my friends, over and over and over. soon, it will be too cold to be outside, and artemis will reign as the queen of winter. the waters around me will freeze, and i will forget about them, until artemis’ reign ends and persephone returns from the underworld.
i will wish for a place to ritually immerse myself. i will battle with the thoughts of properly preparing khernips or creating something that is more personal and profound to me. my spirituality itself feels like a confluence of rivers, endlessly flowing, bringing to my heart the waters of hinduism, the tides of hellenismos, and the waves of my own gnosis.
i will wonder, dreaming endlessly of floating in water, as a child still in its mother’s womb, what water means to me.
this reflection inspired by this article: https://www.hinduismtoday.com/environment/indias-profound-kinship-with-water/
