‘When we try to pick out anything by itself’, says John Muir, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’ Water is like this. It holds and connects the memories, dreams, illusions and delusions of everything and everyone on the entire planet.

With the chaotic India I know and love loitering just meters beyond this walled compound, I stand with feet braced on marble slabs radiant with the morning sun. Undulating water captures the reflection of Amritsar’s Golden Temple, bewitching its leaking image to manifest magnificence greater than the structure itself. Mesmorised, I weep … viscous tears that stick to my eyelashes and blur my vision before, ever so gradually, building momentum to slide down my cheeks and settle at the corners of my mouth. 

Gu means darkness or ignorance; Ru means elimination of that darkness; Guru means light coming from darkness, and Gurudwara is the doorstep of the Guru. Amrit means ambrosia, a substance so aptly reflected in the name given to the body of water that, bar a 65m causeway, maroons the Seikh shrine crowned with a 500kg gold-coated dome: Amrit Sarovar. Simply looking at it floods me with a somatic response that hitches me to everything beyond the soma.

If water holds consciousness—or, in fact, is consciousness itself—then this temple amrit, where literal millions of people have come to bless and be blessed, is so much more than the sum of its parts; more than the sum of the pilgrims, devotees, travellers and nomads who plunge themselves beneath the surface of this sweet nectar to emerge, reborn.

Travel, for me, is like pulling a treasure chest out of the depths of the ocean. It is my rebirthing. All things both delightful and frightful; shiny and shocking. Covered with barnacles, seaweed, and throttled by umbilical rope, the treasure is locked away with rusted chains, seemingly impossible to access. Yet there it is, and the only obstacle to gold and jewels is reluctance, resistance, fear and ignorance. This is the growth point—the crowning—adapting through a myriad complex situations to bring new clarity.

I stand at the door—on the limen—to my inner guru, seeking the gold that only I have the capacity to alchemise. The treasure is the deep inner landscape of putrefaction; the transmutation of lead to gold with each step, thought, emotion and prayer. Yet, like my tears, water has the capacity to both obstruct and clear one’s vision. And so I too must annoint myself with this ambrosial amniotic fluid so I can bust open the rusted lock and emerge from the treasured womb of my dreams. 

Like the four or five hours’ long queuing that devotees must do in order to glimpse the holy book in the inner sanctum, there are no shortcuts to the treasure when a decision is taken to navigate the deep work of psychic dredging. If you want to get to the Inner Sanctum, you must be prepared for drudgery, claustrophobia, patience … gallons of it.

Where vision is blurred, alchemy brings insight. The tears that ebb and flow—the nectar-like medicine for my soul—this ancient wisdom claims, are the crystallised thoughts that life and love can trap. A holy dip strips me naked, to the bone, layer by karmic layer. Never gentle … always strong … water can cut grooves in stone; can rupture mountains; can ratchet open the mind and return its forgotten essence to the curl of the upper lip, where the tongue can catch a glimmer of it’s wisdom … a cyclical flow of watery tears to saturated consciousness awakening my psyche. A re-cycling; a re-viewing; a re-membering. In unbecoming, I become it all.

If the SriNagar lakes are for me the primordial fluid, and the tunnels through the mountains back into India, the birth canal, then Amritsar’s Golden Temple is the ritual purgation that prepares my new soul for incarnation. I use the experience of my body to access the inner dimensions of my being—my ultimate and quintessential source—to perpetually step up to meet my dreams … because it is only the wise who recognise that their dreams are always on their side.

The heart doesn’t wrinkle. Emotions grow only more fine with age. The mind surrenders. And the soul wisens and expands beyond it all. 

As I step into life, I get lived. As I live, I become life itself.