Walking Waters Core

An Offering by Miza Aureus · (Sneak Peek) 

I have known what it feels like to wander among the trees, pacing circles where every path looks the same. Love had left me there, stranded and disoriented, aching for direction. The forest taught me that confusion itself is a compass, that being lost is not a failure but an initiation.

 I have also stood by the waters that hold memory, listening to their haunting lullaby. The current whispered that truth hides beneath surfaces, that healing and danger come braided together. It did not soothe me with certainty. It sang me into trust.

 And then there is the horizon, endless and calling. Beyond the edge lies everything I have not yet touched, the unknown that both terrifies and compels me. The sea does not promise safety; it promises expansion. Its voice tells me to lift my eyes from the woods and my hands from the riverbank and step toward a destiny that has always been mine.

 Forest, river, sea: they have been my teachers. Together, they sketch the map of my life. The woods remind me of my vulnerability, the waters remind me of my depth, and the horizon reminds me of my courage. Lost, found, and beyond—this is the cycle I walk.

 My journey has not been about claiming I was chosen. It has been about listening to what nature already told me: that the darkest soil grows the strongest roots, that pain metabolized becomes wisdom, that the serpent and the waters and the woods are not burdens, but guides.

I have been lost. I have been found. And still, I keep walking beyond. Through certain hardships and silent struggles, I began searching for meaning in every direction. What I was given could not hold me, so I turned to many doorways—some offering structure, some offering symbols, some offering spirit. Each a fragment along a path I didn’t yet know I was walking, slowly helping me rebuild the whole I was never shown. Beneath it all ran an undercurrent—a silent spring, a trickling of thought, a ripple of reflection I could not yet name. 

When I was still but fertile soil, I read a memoir about a woman who walked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995, spiraling in the wake of her mother’s death and the collapse of her life. It cast wilderness not as escape but as crucible, a place where grief, hardship, and silence peel back the human layers and forge someone new. For me it became more than a story; it was a myth of self-discovery, a series of tests and chosen hardships: to face my perceived shortcomings, confront my true self, and surrender to selflessness as I walked the trail that mirrored my soul, until I stumbled into self-understanding and gratitude for a world that had once brought me to my knees.

I dreamed of what could lie along that path, what animals might confront me, what plants might call for me to rest my finger upon, what waterfalls might strip me bare and teach me who I was. And what if I fell in love with a stranger along the way? Would he be heading in the same direction, or walking against me?

But life dragged me elsewhere, into trials I never saw coming. The path kept twisting, each bend demanding more, each turn throwing monkey shit in my face. Yet even in that forsakenness, something was working its way through me. In time, I awoke to another truth: the trail was never out there. Obstacles became lessons, illusions stripped away one by one. I had not come with gear or boots as I once imagined; I carried only the chains I forged myself and the weight of sacred longing, a perfect contradiction. And it wasn’t backpack straps digging into me, it was stumbling radio-silent through the black nights with no lamp, no voice, only the echo of invitation. The solitude wasn’t some peaceful forest hush, no green cathedral of leaves overhead; it was the sting of being cast out for speaking truths no one wanted to hear, hauling the weight of the world’s horrors on my back, the price of refusing to look away. 

I had been walking the PCT all along—not in miles, but in the inward journey, returning to familiar places with new eyes, shedding and remembering, breaking and mending. What I thought would be a spirit quest among land and beast was never a becoming, but the long labor of reclaiming what lay hidden underground—neither lost nor broken, only waiting to be unearthed. Each return to the shadow was not a retreat, but a pilgrimage. I bent to gather her scattered fragments, forgiving the hands that dropped them. I carved through icebergs of silence and pain until I touched her core, still true, still burning. And when I circled back again, I did not turn away. I held her. I believed her. I trusted her. So it is that my past and present, bound together, walk toward the future self we are birthing; whole in the knowing that to carry our brightest flame, we must also cradle our darkest ash. 

Even the heavens confess it: the moon, in her turning, stirs the waters again and again, each tide familiar, yet never the same. What seems like repetition is always change: each tide returning, but never to the same shore; each wave echoing the last, yet reshaped by wind, depth, and time. Water remembers, but it never repeats. It carves valleys, births rivers, shifts coastlines. It rises to the sky and falls again as rain. It can lie still as glass, or gather into storms that roar across oceans, unleashing a force no one can command. 

This was the secret hidden in water all along: that movement itself is memory, that to flow is to change, and that every return deepens rather than confines. And in those waters I recognized myself—shaping, storming, remembering, never the same twice. The trail had not molded me once, but again and again, the way water molds the land—through return, through persistence, through time. 

And still, in all my searching for ancient wisdom, for teachings to heal my inner child and unearth my buried soul, the message was always the same: be like water. Move without losing yourself; shaping to the vessel yet never contained by it. Yield without surrendering, wear down stone not with force but with patience. For water is resilience in motion: it can crash with fury or whisper as a trickle through stone, rise weightless as mist or sink into unfathomable depths, yet through every form it remains wholly itself. 

And then, on an unextraordinary day, my cascade came, not from mountain peaks nor artesian depths, but in the simplest place: a bathtub. Naked, submerged, I dissolved into Water and discovered the truth. 

When I needed to be Earth, I rooted myself; unyielding, immovable, steady against the storm. Yet Water still moved through me, soft as silk, relentless as time. For too long, I was pressed into clay, shaped by hands not my own, forced into molds that cracked at my edges. Earth steadied me, yet when turned into prison, it grew too heavy, too still. And water cannot be contained; it claims its freedom in motion. So the time came to let go. In release, I remembered my source: the quiet spring within. Not earned, not granted, only uncovered. I was never a seeker chasing water, but part of its endless weaving, a co-creator who knows when to rise, when to retreat, when to climb to higher ground as tides draw back. 

Water and Earth are sacred partners: one, the clay, the form, the vessel; the other, the essence, the motion, the breath. Earth rose as body, Water as spirit—the boundless sea in covenant with the land, a harmony as ancient as creation itself. 

In the distinction of their embrace, I finally understood: what I mistook for cycles was always the spiral of becoming. 

I had been moving all along, already whole. 

It was never stillness I lacked; my waters rose as revelation, breaking the silence with their tide. And those who hurt me—they are Earth: faulted, trembling beneath their own pressures. They are mountains worn down, plains split open, fault lines threatening to rupture. Like Earth, they too are wounded, exploited, repeating patterns older than themselves. Their harm was not born in them alone, but carried in Water’s memory. For a stream does not forget; it carves its story into stone. Yet the tide retreats transformed, and the cloud never returns as the same drop it once was. Even in their change, truth remains, etched into the waters like runes, seen only by those who dare to see their own reflection. Because I let truth flow where they demanded silence, I became the river that would not dam. Their walls crumbled, their masks dissolved, for no façade endures against the tide.

Once, I thought I had to chase the water, but I see now that I was the current all along. Tricksters and deceivers cast their shadows, but they do not command the sea. Only the moon compels water, unless the Earth that holds it quakes and breaks. And so I stand at last, not fractured but gathered, like waves returning to the sea, like footsteps returning to the trail. The undercurrent was always there, carrying me forward, even when I thought I was lost.