Bottled water didn't used to be something I thought about. Sometimes I would drink it, if it was convenient, sometimes I would remember my own water bottle from home and refill it at sinks or drinking fountains. It never occurred to me where the water inside that bottle came from. Until about two years ago when a bottled water plant was suddenly approved to be built in our small community.
Immediately, our community jumped into action. Over the past two years I have been involved in public meetings, getting stories out in the media, fundraising projects to help pay for mounting legal fees the neighbors of this plant are incurring, and more. It's far from over, but last week, a judge finally said that our county commissioners did not properly review a zoning request and asked them to review it again.
During this time, I have learned far more than I intended about how water is extracted from the earth and put into a plastic bottle for us to so conveniently drink.
I'll save you the technical details, since that's not really what we do here on this blog, but take some time to watch the documentary Tapped and learn more about where bottled water comes from and the potential dangers of consuming it. It's available for free HERE if you have Amazon Prime.
I finally sat down and asked my guides to share their thoughts on water extraction for bottled water and (as usual) they had plenty to say.
First of all, although water is water, they shared with me that water is heavily influenced by its place. I think we have all experienced how water tastes different in different communities. Some of this is functional – what minerals it passes through in the ground before it comes into our homes. But my guides say that it's more than that.
Water has a sense of place and should be consumed in the area in which it is. When it is moved to another location, it loses much of its quality and certainly its spiritual benefits. Not to mention the plastic bottles that are choking much of the earth, our oceans, and us.
They tell me that interrupting the natural flow of water is painful and damaging. It is an intelligent being that is moving and flowing to where it is most needed. When we stop that process, we can be creating dire circumstances somewhere further down the line. This is one big, living ecosystem and sucking a bunch of water out of the earth to ship somewhere else is incredibly dangerous for the earth and for ourselves.
Now, at this point, I had to stop my guides. I mean….aren't we doing the exact same thing when we drill a well for a city or for our homes? How is this any different?
They said that water wants to nourish us and is aware that it needs to be extracted for our home use and that our modern life in our communities means that it is the necessary way for us to get our water. There is plenty of local water to meet our needs, if we allow the natural flow of water. Plus, it's still coming from our local water sources – it's not being shipped in from some other location.
Water is asking that we work with it intentionally. This is actually a message I hear often about many things that we treat as commodities. It's still “functional” as a commodity, but it has so many more values that we can't know until we intentionally ask if it will work with us.
Fresh water is becoming more of a rarity. We're polluting our waterways with chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers (a topic for a whole different post!). It evaporates and then rains back down on us and the earth. As it soaks back down into the earth and through the many layers of sediment and rock, it can slowly be cleaned and purified by the earth. Pulling that water out and sending it off to another state in a plastic bottle means we lose the opportunity to put that fresh water back into our ecosystem.
We have got to not only be more mindful of how we consume water and where it comes from, but also help to bring the spirit back into our water. When we don't acknowledge it's inherent spirit, we cannot benefit from it. So every day when you can turn the shower on, wash the dishes, or water your garden, give thanks. Bless it. Thank it. Let the water flow where it belongs.
