the spring at Alton Barnes & Alton Priors
Autumn Equinox 2024 a water ceremony held by a sacred spring whose sanctity can be traced back for millennia. This beautiful spring in the rolling Wiltshire countryside is source to the Salisbury Avon and has been a centre for worship since at least the Neolithic and likely long before then too.
River Blessings is a group of politicians, druids, Christians, earth-based celebrants, activists, teachers, farmers, Buddhist, all faiths and none, artists, mayors... who come together at each stage of the wheel of the year.
We are a group of people who may have different political and spiritual persuasions but who all share a love for and concern about water and rivers.
On September 22nd 2024 we gathered for Autumn Equinox and World Rivers Day. The rain was torrential (!) and we were able to take shelter in an Anglo-Saxon church which is deconsecrated and make our offering, our living prayer, which we then took out to the spring.
Everyone contributed their local waters, flowers and very moving words of gratitude, grief, relationship with water and prayer. We sang a Q'echuan song to the mother waters, the Japanese Water Blessing Song by Nalini Blossom and I read out a song 'this is the river ' written in proto-Celtic by Carolyn Hillyer.
I also shared the story of Shirley Krenak whose life-story and identity are intimately bound to the river Watu (Brazil) and who has a powerful message of identification with our local biome and river which is relevant to us all. Three years ago I was at a gathering in London in the wake of the Glasgow COP when Simon McBurney brought Shirley and other members of the Krenak tribe to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm to give them a platform to share their wisdom with us, their message so needing to be heeded at this time of ecological crisis. The atmosphere in the Roundhouse was electrifying and I write about this in more depth elsewhere, but the gist of their message was for us to try saying:
"I am Watu" , "I am biome" and to feel the empowerment of understanding this aspect of our identity and belonging.
It is with deep gratitude to, and respect for, Shirley Krenak that I have extrapolated from her wisdom and invite everyone in our ceremonies to feel the deeply nurturing quality of saying "I am river...." as they pour their sacred waters into our collective jug of living waters and prayers which we then offer to the river who is the focus for our gathering.
The church where we sheltered has megaliths under the floor boards who you can reveal by lifting trap doors. So we stood in the flow of history in a beautiful Anglo-Saxon church with a White Horse in the distance, and then went out to venerate the source of the Salisbury Avon in the footsteps of our ancestors. Our ceremony spanned space time as words from different cultures and times were sung and spoken and participants each brought waters and stories from their locale.
megalith under floorboards of church
creating a living prayer of waters and flowers
Elder Annie Spencer offers our prayers
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