Double rainbow over the Tasman Sea
Today, on a gift discovery retreat walk in Tasmania, I watched water strike the rocks and ripple back across itself. The movement was so sudden, so intricate, it seemed like something living was flying along the surface.
Water has always felt like home to me. I love its sounds, its fluidity, the way it holds me almost weightless when I swim. What I realised today is how much I love its freedom. There is no permanent way of locking water into one shape. Even ice eventually melts. We borrow it, drink it, play with it. It moves through us and beyond us. We cannot keep it.
I’m spending some time reflecting on nature elements and their relationship with my Core Gift:
My core gift is helping others shine golden in the tapestry of being. I do this by looking deeply to see who is truly there, remembering our inviolable equality and walking into the unknown with an open heart so possibility can sing.
Water offers me another way to understand this gift.
At my best, I offer people reflections in which they can recognise their own brightness, their gifts and wisdom. I seek to help them create room for what is still emerging, for something that may not yet have words, born from their own embodied knowing.
Before I knew my gift, I believed I was broken and needed to be fixed. Knowing it has helped me find a golden thread of meaning through difficult experiences. Self-doubt still visits, but I have somewhere deeper to return to: a sense of what is mine to give.
This is part of why I teach Focusing and gift discovery. I care about people whose lived experience has been dismissed or understood only through what is wrong. I want their perspectives to be heard, their wisdom recognised, their own sense of a way forward respected.
Water also brought me a question.
My work sometimes feels like a delta: storytelling, Focusing, gift discovery, community conversations, writing. Many small streams making their way towards the sea.
I wonder what might become possible if I gave those streams a clearer channel. Somewhere to gather what I’m learning and offer it more regularly. Perhaps this writing can be one such place.
On the walk, my body began heavy and reluctant. Then, somewhere among the trees, unfamiliar birdsong and sea sounds, something softened. I wanted to keep walking.
My direction has often unfolded like that, step by step, before I could explain where I was going.
I am water: many streams of possibility finding their way home. I am learning how to gather them, and how to offer what they carry.