Thank you to everyone who continues to read my blog posts — old and new!

Today is a rainy and windy day in the greater Boston area.

Now that it’s December, part of me wishes that it were snow falling insead of rain.

The sentimental part of me, that is.

The practical part of me — who would be helping to shovel it from our sidewalk, porches, and driveway — is OK with rain.

I was very grateful to read recently that Massachusetts has mostly recovered from last summer’s drought due to the rain which has fallen in recent months.

Hurrah!

But as most of us know, the rest of the world is not as fortunate — with water levels falling to unprecedented levels in the western and southwestern parts of the USA, for example.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

I wrote a blog post in January 2020 which featured an older version of today’s song.

You can click here to check it out if you are curious. I went wild with lots of water imagery from Pixabay…

However, in keeping with my current resolve to share shorter blog posts, I will include fewer photos today.

Another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

I’ve been getting acupuncture on a regular basis for 30+ years.

My practitioners have been part of the five-element school of acupuncture, which is an extremely wise and beautiful branch of acupuncture.

Each patient, for example, is viewed as a garden to be tended to by the practitioner in order that all five elements/phases of our body/mind/spirit — water, wood, fire, earth, and metal —remain harmonious and in balance.

The water element corresponds — among many other things — with the season of winter, with the feeling of fear (and/or the lack of fear), with the taste of salt, with the sound of groaning, with slowing down/resting/sleeping, with meditating, and with the experience of not-knowing.

You can click here for a link to an acupuncturist’s webpage which describes more about the water element if you are curious.

Most of us are a blend of all five elements/phases.

I, for example, was diagnosed by J. R. Worsley as a Wood type — with Earth and Water within (ie: Mud as I like jokingly to say).

He recommended, among other things, that I do more swimming — and in the years since my diagnostic visit with him I have spent many hours in pools, lakes, ponds and oceans.

Recently, however, I have become less excited about swimming in the crowded chlorinated pool — which also hosts swimming classes for children of all ages — nearest my home.

So nowadays I swim in lakes and ponds (and occasionally the ocean) during the warmer months of the year — although a friend and I did have share a brisk, final swim in Walden Pond this past October.

It is very easy for many of us to take fundamental blessings such as daily access to clean water for granted.

I continue to be a fan of counting one’s blessings as an antidote to the onslaught of news and commercial messages with which most of us are bombarded every day via social media, television, radio, ads on the sides of busses, etc.

One more deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

May we all be mindful of ways that we can conserve and honor and re-use the water flowing through our faucets, our showers, our baths, our washing machines, our dishwashers, our veins, our arteries, our lymphatic vessels, our skin, our tear ducts, our plants, our forests, our systems of agriculture, etc.

I will end with a few more delightful images from Pixabay of different forms of water.

Thank you to all of the photographers who share their work there.

Thank you to Doug Hammer for contributing his artistry to my song as a pianist and as an engineer.

You are always welcome to visit my website — where you can find many songs and learn more about my musical life here on planet earth if you are curious.

You can also find me singing on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, YouTube and other digital music platforms.

Any song you “like” or “heart” or add to one of your playlists will improve the algorithmic activity of my music there!

I hope to release my “Ode to Water” to the non-WordPress musical world sometime in 2023…

Thank you again for reading and listening to one of my blog posts.

Very gratefully yours,

will