The Water Close to Its Source

I first heard the words sweet water in the mountains.

I had come across a tiny stream seeping out of the rock. Just a thin trickle of mountain water, but it was the gentlest space I had ever seen.

I had been walking for some time with a limp from a painful hip injury at sea when this soft meadow emerged.

Something in me released. I cried and cried.

I realised then that the pain I was carrying did not just derive from what had happened on the yacht a few weeks before I arrived home. I also had an extremely painful neck, a bit of a sore heart, and that my body had been carrying a lifetime of bracing for the unknown. Of holding my breath for a place to call home.

"The sweet water," someone with me said, referring to the water seemingly seeping from the mountain rock.

I knew the words had meaning beyond that moment. Fresh mountain and river water has long been known as sweet water across different cultures and traditions, and the language became part of my spiritual learning when I came home.

Sweet water described something I could feel, perhaps something I was made of.

I had recently left the yachts after many years at sea and returned to South Africa without a plan, in response to a calling impossible to ignore. I wanted to come back to solid ground, to myself and to a way of living that felt simpler and more true.

After years surrounded by salt water, I began finding water in a different form.

Mountain streams. Rock pools. Thin ribbons running through the land. Water closer to where it began.

I ended that year alone in the Cederberg mountains, swimming naked in the water. The next morning, I shared a thought:

"Transitioning into this year feeling cleansed, gentle and perhaps a bit tender."

I called the post Sweetwater.

Sweetwater was not a brand then. It was a word and a feeling I was following.

Two weeks later, I travelled to Brazil for a vision quest. I spent four days and nights alone on a mountain without food or water, in a foreign land. Just me, the elements and my own realities.

You cannot get much simpler, clearer or closer to your truth than that.

The words came back to me there:

Sweet Water.

This time, I knew I would come home and work with them. I did not know exactly what I would create or what shape it would take, but I knew the words held something I wanted to live by, create from and exist in.

I would work with that word.

I would be that word.

Returning to source means coming back to what is simple, clear and true.

That was what I had begun doing before Sweetwater became a brand.

And it is still what I am doing now.