Poppit Sands, December 2023. It was a grey, misty afternoon, drained of colour, with a sharp wind and deafening breaking waves. Walking up and down the foaming shoreline I was lost in a bubble, contemplating my way forward. On the bend where the sea and river meet, my eyes were drawn to a shiny object. What was it? Like a beach crow I stalked it along the water’s edge, watching the surging waves tumble it, drop it, and pick it up again. When I stooped to pick it up myself, I found that it was a piece of tin. In its torn and jagged edges I saw the cliffs, the rocks, and the ‘narrows’ of the river. Its curve was the moon rising over the wide tidal estuary. Whether it was washed up by the sea, or washed down by the river, I felt this little piece of tin carried with it a message - to get to know the river at night. I found myself humming inside my hood, my body was still resonating after singing Pauline Oliveros’s Heart Chant that morning with Simon, Gwen and Omari. Probably it was this that led me to exploring the relationship between the river, the moon and the heart. Before long, I marked all the full moons in my diary, making a resolution to spend time with the river on each of them, and record what happened.

Looking back through the journal I kept - of the things I noticed around me, and the things I noticed inside myself - I see that this practice changed something in me. Listening to the water, the moon and my heart brought emotions to light. Love and anger, hope and despair, joy and overwhelm, which the water and the moon supported me in noticing, processing and moving through. I paid attention to and listened to my emotions, at the same time as listening to the river.

In Ebb and Flow Easkey Britton writes ,“The sound of water regulates our central nervous system, altering our brain waves and releasing a flood of neurochemicals that increase blood flow to our heart as well as our brain, causing our whole body to relax.”

Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory describes how messages carried by the vagal nerve between the heart and the brain regulate our emotions and behaviour. According to Wallace J. Nichols’s Blue Mind theory, being in water changes our brainwaves. The mammalian diving reflex slows our heartbeat, supporting wellbeing and calm. Luci Attala (in How Water Makes Us Human) talks about thinking with water, of knowing-with water, the material that makes up a large part of our bodies and brains, that continually cycles in, around and out of our bodies. The properties and behaviour of water make us human. Gravity’s effect, along with water’s sticky tendencies, and its habit of forming spheres, causes it to move in spirals. The human heart is shaped like a coiling tube, a spiralling helix of muscle that creates a vortex, or whirlpool, to move our blood efficiently. A few studies have looked into the effect of the full moon on the human heart, noting that it seems to be beneficial - perhaps because the moon’s gravitational pull at its strongest point assists the movement of liquid through the heart. Does the Moon beat inside my chest?

Water must keep moving.

Taking part in the Practicing Places “I Fyny’r Afon”workshop with Simon Whitehead and Kirstie Simson, brought an awareness of moving with the liquid that spirals through us. Through such an awareness we can attune ourselves to the river before we even enter it. And once we enter it, we know that, “Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au – I Am The River, The River Is Me” - as sung by Jen Cloher (see below for a link to her song on YouTube).

Fi yw’r afon, yr afon ydw i.

Listening is multidirectional. As we listen to the river, the river listens to us too, and sometimes we can notice its response. Jaques Benveniste said that water has a memory. Its molecules communicate, amplify and relay signals. Can we connect the molecules that run through our heart to the molecules that run along the river’s course? What message could we send? What if - just as we are healed by the white noise of water, which takes us back to the safe space of our mothers’ watery wombs - we can heal the river, through sound and through song.

I had been struck by something else Easkey Britton wrote about in her book Ebb and Flow: how the heart’s electromagnetic field can be sensed outside our bodies. I pictured the moon as the river’s heart, I pictured my heart’s energy rippling across and through the water. Usually I write after swimming. The moonlight reflected in the ripples started to form, fleetingly, into words that I worked to decipher.