You Are the One Who Calls the Wind and the Water
Module 4: The One Who Blesses
What can break our argument with reality?
How will we ever return to the spring of bright blessing?
Hello, love — Welcome to Module Four.
This week, we turn toward the quietest place inside us—the one that never left the womb of belonging. Together, we’ll look at the ways we argue with reality, and the ancient practices that help us return to presence, connection, and trust. We’ll explore the words bracha and gāthā, the blessing and the song, and follow the threads that they weave through story, dream, memory, and attention.
You’ll be invited to try one simple, daily practice. To bless a wound. To write your own gāthā. To listen for the quieter voice. Just one gesture of presence can change the way the world moves around you.
Blessings, big love.
~ Amy xxoo
Before we begin, a shift in policy—
I am moved, more and more, toward open-hearted offering. Going forward, these modules will be open to all subscribers. Paid subscribers will receive my audio recording and private reflections by separate email.
Module Four
You Are the One Who Calls the Wind and Water
Modern life is, in so many ways, a never-ending argument with reality.
We argue with the weather—too hot, too cold, too damp, too dry. We argue with traffic, with train delays, with the slow line at the store. We argue with our boss’s expectations, our children’s endless needs, our partners’ lack of listening. We stare at our screens, arguing: why is the world this way? Why is everyone so fake?
But all of these outer arguments mirror a deeper, more persistent one:
This should be easier.
I should feel more comfortable.
I need more than I have.
Underneath it all is a trembling, primal ache:
I feel afraid.
I feel alone.
Something is missing.
Something is wrong.
There is another way to live.
The Primal Fear
In Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh writes that our very first experience of life—birth—is a rupture. As we are cast out of the warm, protected space of the mother’s body, the fear that we will die is born—alongside the desire to survive. He calls these: Primal Fear and Primal Desire.
We are afraid. And we go searching. Believing that we’re looking for more money, love, or time when what we are really seeking is much simpler:
A return to belonging. To being held and protected, floating in the radiant water of the womb we once knew. The ease of quiet, restful peace.
The teacher Byron Katie tells the story of waking up one morning on the floor of a halfway house and, after years of suffering, all of the arguments were gone. No judgment. No complaint. No fear. There was only this. A cockroach crawling across her foot. The ceiling above her. The joy of being.
She had not achieved enlightenment. She had simply stopped resisting reality. She hadn’t studied or trained for it. She had simply stopped. And in that moment—falling in love with what is—she was free.
I had a moment like that after my stroke.
After a night of terror in the emergency room, I woke in the hospital and the terror was gone. But something else was gone too: the . . . voice. The one that had worried and fretted and anxiously controlled. I could feel it there, sleeping. Exhausted. Not because I’d mastered mindfulness, but because the stroke had stopped everything.
I lay in bed and listened. Reader, I looked for that voice. For as long as I could remember, it had been there, fretting and worrying me along. But now, when I reached for it there was . . . absence. Silence. Then, beside the absence, another voice rose. It was quieter, softer but also, in its way, stronger. The voice of welcome, of generosity, of acceptance. A voice made entirely of love.
All day, I felt inside myself - the way that a tongue goes searching (at first) for a missing tooth. But it was gone. There was no worrying, no controlling, no fear. Just this body in this bed. Just the kind nurses and cleaning crew coming and going. Just the rain spattering the window—splish-ity-splash — astonishing in its simplicity.
This was a silence so deep it seemed to hold the whole world. This was a ‘space’ - deep inside of me that I hadn’t even known was there - well, I had known but I hadn’t been there in such a long, long time. I remember this: I lay in bed weeping, welcoming this softness. This gentle and generous holding that loved me as I was. That loved the world just as it is.
When my brain eventually began to heal, the voice came back online—but it wasn’t as dominant. Or maybe it was simply that, having encountered the fullness of the quieter, stronger voice, everything felt different. More balanced. Easier.
Later, I came to understand it in anatomical terms. The stroke had temporarily quieted the busy, questing (and often anxious) left brain, creating space for the right brain’s more receptive, inclusive nature to emerge.
It was a psychological event—but also a medical one. It was also, for me, a profoundly symbolic event. Mythic in its effect on my life ever since, as I establish a seat for the quiet stillness of the right brain, which loves everything. As I soften my resistance to the vigilant left brain, viewed through the ‘eye’ of the right which sees it, as it sees everything through the eye of love. As a wholeness. A vast interior space in which all that is, is already blessed. Already good.
This is the view of the unfiltered right brain—the view stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor (famously) described this way:
“In the absence of my left hemisphere’s analytical judgment, I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience.”
— Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight
In Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh describes aanother vision of interconnectedness, describing a day when while walking outside . . .
“I felt something like an umbilical cord connecting me to the sun in the sky. I saw very clearly that if the sun was not there I would die right now. Then I saw an umbilical cord linking me to the river… Without the river, I would die. And I saw an umbilical cord connecting me to the forest… and to the farmer who grows the food I eat.”
This image is so simple. So immediate. Seeing it, one has to laugh - of course, we are tethered! We are woven in - cellularly, spiritually—to the sun, air, water, soil. To hands that plant, carry, clean, cook. To the beings we will never meet who tend the land, who harvest the fields, who package and ship our food to market. Of course!
And yet, modern life—a life of screens and machines—can give us the impression that we are independent, questing beings who make our own way in this world. It turns our attention away from the invisible threads—umbilical cords—that weave a web which, like a wide, all-encompassing womb, holds us all.
Threads of connection.
These themes alive in me, I met my friend Judith at the Art Café in Nyack—a place we’ve returned to for years. She’s been reading along with us, following the modules of this workshop on blessing. And over Picasso Salad, she shared a teaching from her study of mystical Judaism.
On a napkin, she sketched four Hebrew letters: ב ר כ ה — Bet, Resh, Kaf, Heh. “These are the characters that form the word bracha,” she said—the Hebrew word for blessing. “The same letters, with different vowel sounds, also form the word bereka, which means spring—as in a spring of living water.”
She looked up and smiled: “Kabbalists believe that when words share identical letters like this, they are mystically related. The link isn’t just linguistic—it’s symbolic, metaphysical. A bracha is a spring. To bless someone is to open a source of living water. And water,” she said, “knows no boundaries. To bless one is to bless all.”
The words themselves are a map.
That image stayed with me. A blessing isn’t just a wish or a prayer, weightless without real effect. It’s a powerful presencing—a reminder of what is already flowing.
In that sense, a blessing is a command, directed not to the heavens but to ourselves. It asks that we open our eyes and see what is already here, already flowing to us - and everyone else.
Like water, blessing moves our attention beyond our own borders, beyond our limited ability to see. It re-establishes our connection to the field and to each other. In this way, the river of blessing, like Thich Nhat Hanh’s invisible threads, connects us to everything and everyone.
Synchronistically, this week, an old friend shared a dream:
“I keep dreaming of water,” he said. “My friends tell me it means 'emotional turbulence' but . . . What do you think?”
I asked him to say more.
“Most often, I dream of my grandparents standing in the ocean. The water is always clear. And they’re still alive. We can talk to each other. It gives me great joy.”
This is indeed a dream about emotion, I told him—but not troubling feeling.
It’s about love.
The water is the medium of connection. Clear connection. His love for his grandparents is carried by the water—a blessing he can still access because of the living water.
Blessing is water. Water is blessing. We are held inside of a great womb space, connected by invisible threads to all creation.
Okay, but how - in practical, modern world terms - do we access that spring?
There are many ways—meditative practices that wait like boats at the shorelines of our lives. Dreams that remind us how connected we are and will always be.
This morning, I read about gāthās, short poetic blessings offered when doing the most mundane activities: drinking tea, slicing bread, serving a meal. I looked it up and a whole new stream of connection opened. I learned that:
Each gāthā is a small door. A moment of deliberate action - a blessing spoken into the moment - which calls US into presence of blessing.
Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.
The gāthā interrupts our argument with reality, returning out attention to presence. And if it’s not yet clear, presence is the gateway to the spring.
You could say our incessant argument with reality is a kind of shadow gāthā. Every day, we repeat the same short spell of un-blessing:
This should be better.
This should be easier.
This should be different.
You could say that, with presence, the gāthā reverses that un-blessing. Reestablishing the world of light - and placing us back into the womb of belonging.
Things are as they are.
And by my attention to them—as they are
—they are blessed and
I am released from the suffering
of trying to change everything.
Two new words: Gāthā and Bracha.
Words from two different languages yet they sound so similar, don’t they? Each requires breath—an inhale and an exhalation with two beats. This similarity feels deliberate. As if language itself is pointing toward a secret that is itself a living stream.
Let’s dive in!
The word Bracha leads to Bereka—a spring of living water.
Where might gāthā lead us?
Fascinatingly, Gāthā leads us to music, to singing - another flowing blessing.
The word gāthā comes from the Sanskrit root gai (गै), which means to sing or to speak. A gāthā is literally a verse, song, or poem—usually one that is spoken aloud and remembered easily. In both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, gāthās were used to preserve sacred teachings in rhythmic, oral form before writing was common. They are short teachings, preserved in memory as songs.
At its root, a gāthā is a song of remembrance—not just a technique, but a carrier of memory, rhythm, breath, and sacred meaning.
Writing this, I’m reminded of whale songs1—how they travel through the depths of the ocean, just as music (and gāthā, and blessing) travel through the air.
If we look at gāthā not just linguistically but symbolically, we find more parallels to brach:
Both arise from voice—the exhale, the shaping of breath into sound.
Both carry the sacred across time—oral tradition as memory stream.
Both are meant to be spoken again and again, like a chant, to realign perception.
So if bracha is the spring (bereka)—the source—
Then gāthā is the song that rides its current.
It may not etymologically double as “river” or “spring,” but in function and form, it is the water’s movement. Bracha opens the source. Gāthā moves within it.
Wow.
Bracha is the gateway to Bereka, the spring.
Gāthā is the boat - carrying us onto the water.
Wow.
A Simple Practice
My old friend, Joseph Rubano once shared a practice with me:
Every day for a year, I did one thing: I put my shoes on the same way—right, then left. And took them off the same way—left, then right. I placed them beneath the same bench at the door. This simple act trained my mind to remember. To pay attention. To follow simple instruction. It said: I am the boss of my attention.
He was working with Rudolf Steiner’s Six Basic Exercises—Control of Will. Cultivating our attention (mindfulness) to what we are doing as a way of transforming the self - and the world. Not by controlling things (This should be better, different than it is) but by engaging with what is here. These shoes. The right and then the left.
In this exercise, Steiner advised choosing a simple, voluntary act and performing it at a self-chosen time each day—to cultivate intention, presence, and inner strength.
And yet, curiously, Joseph told me—laughing as he shared it—that this was one of the most difficult, nearly impossible tasks he’d ever given himself. The simple act of doing the same thing, the same way, every single day flushed up everything: the resistance, the objections, the whole story about being controlled.
All of it surfaced.
All from putting on his shoes.
What a powerful exercise.
So, now, here at the end of our module, what can we make of the four stories that came to us this week?
A man walking, seeing the umbilical cords of connection.
A woman on the floor of a halfway house, loving a cockroach.
A man dreaming of loved ones standing in water.
A woman in a hospital, resting in silence.
A man taking off his shoes on a bench by the door.
These stories have many overlapping threads and themes. Allow yourself to sit with them for a moment. What did reading the stories stir in you?
Notice that each story this week offered a doorway: A moment when someone stopped resisting reality and stepped into presence.
That’s all a blessing really is. A pause. A breath.
A quiet agreement with what is.
From that place, the spring begins to flow.
This week, some practices to play with:
Gāthās
Choose one small action you do pretty much every day. Something you do without thinking about it. Boiling water. Checking your phone. Putting on your shoes.
As you do it, speak it aloud.
I fill the kettle.
I place it on the flame.
As it warms, I wait—
standing in presence,
supported and ready.
Or try this:
Identify one argument you’re having with reality.
Then write a gāthā that gently reverses it.
Here’s how:
Simplify the argument:
This should not be the way it is.Then begin your gāthā:
This is the way it is.
Or try Rubano’s practice:
Identify one action you already do every day.
Return the keys to the same place.
Place the milk in the same spot.
Do it daily for a week, or a month, or a year.
Notice your resistance. Notice your engagement. Notice whatever happens.
And finally—
Speak a bracha (blessing) over a wound:
A memory. A place. A conversation.
Not to erase what happened, but to release what’s been trapped. To command yourself into the presence of the sacred - right where you are. To release it all to the flow.
As we close this week’s module,
A final blessing from me to you.
May it ripple outward and soften something that is asking to let go. May it touch someone you will never meet with bracha.
Remember:
You are not the map.
You are the spring.
You are not the boat.
You are the one who calls the wind
that carries it across the water—
You are the one who remembers,
the by your remembrance,
you are the one who blesses,
and by that simple act,
you are the one who can say:
this is good, just as it is. Let it flow.
If you’ve followed my stroke journey, you’ll remember the Dear Dolphins letters I wrote last summer and fall. :) All of this discussion of blessing and song, of water and flow, feels resonant with that journey.
This reminded me that I learned once that to be blessed means something like to be seen. To bless is to see and accept. I like that. Blessed be.