WATER
Water: Dream symbol meaning of Water deals with cleansing and emotional stirrings. If the Water is murky in your dream, this is a warning not to get involved in new endeavors. If the Water is clear, success is coming your way. Seeing yourself in Water's reflection means that you aren't being fully honest with yourself. When you contemplate your dream of Water, keep in mind Water is a symbol of your emotional state.
With the strange beauty of a dream, Water intercuts between powerful individual stories, exploring man's desire to push himself to the limits in a world of increasingly unstable climate change.
Water plays a central and critical role in all aspects of life – in the national environment, in our economies, in food security, in production, in politics.
The inadequacy in the supply and access to water has only recently taken centre stage in global reflection as a serious and threatening phenomenon. Communities and individuals can exist even for substantial periods without many essential goods. The human being, however, can survive only a few days without clean, safe drinking water.
Many people living in poverty, particularly in the developing countries, daily face enormous hardship because water supplies are neither sufficient nor safe. Women bear a disproportionate hardship. For water users living in poverty this is rapidly becoming an issue crucial for life and, in the broad sense of the concept, a right to life issue.
Water is a major factor in each of the three pillars of sustainable development – economic, social and environmental. In this framework, it is understood that water must meet the needs of the present population and those of future generations of all societies. This is not solely in the economic realm but in the sphere of integral human development. Water policy, to be sustainable, must promote the good of every person and of the whole person.
Water has a central place in the practices and beliefs of many religions of the world. This significance manifests itself differently in various religions and beliefs. Yet two particular qualities of water underlie its central place in religions: water is a primary building block of life, a creative force; water cleanses by washing away impurities, purifying objects for ritual use as well as making a person clean, externally and spiritually, ready to come into the presence of the focus of worship.
SAND
“Sand throughout Polynesia is considered the physical representation of all our ancestors. Therefore, we prefer to be buried in sand because we are ‘one hanau’ (born of the sand) and therefore returned to the sand.”
He continues, “Sand was never used in physical healing. However, it was used in spiritual healing ceremonies. If it is being used in any spa, it is more than likely creative marketing. It would seem to be a desecration of cultural beliefs and practices. Like rocks, sand should never be taken off the island.”
So let your memory of those pristine beaches be just a footprint in the sand, ulti- mately washing away with the tide, but leaving an impression in the mind. In other words, you can’t take it with you, but you can take it with you.
ROCK/MOUNTAINS/LANDSCAPE
Mountain: Mountains in our dreams symbolize conquering, overcoming, hard work, willpower, and ascending above petty circumstances. Climbing the Mountain implies hard work in learning a new skill. Descending the Mountain implies stepping back from a situation, taking time to think about your actions, getting a second opinion. A Mountain range in your dream represents a new adventure, and is a message encouraging expansion in your life
The idea of a cultural landscape as a meaningful way to organize cultural data about places and their relationships with each other has emerged over the past few decades. Today, we refer to larger, integrated, and more abstract phenomena about places and their connections as cultural landscapes. Recent scholarship (Dewey-Hefley et al., 1998; Stoffle, Halmo, and Austin, 1997; Stoffle et al., 2000a,b; Zedeño, 1997, 2000; Zedeño, Austin, and Stoffle, 1997) sheds light on methodological, analytical, and theoretical issues remaining to be resolved before cultural landscapes are understood as networks of connected places.
The concept of cultural landscape derives from the notion that the land exists in the mind of a people and that their imagery or knowledge of the land is both shared among them and transferred over generations. All human groups develop and come to share cultural landscapes. The concept implies that many cultural groups (ethnic groups) can hold different, even conflicting, images of the same land. The imagery of the land thatis held by a people is a result of their past experiences with the land and other cultural perspectives of the people themselves.
A cultural landscape expands the idea that a special place can have dozens of cultural meanings. Central to the concept is the notion that not all places within it have the same culture value even for a single ethnic group. The places may derive their value from interactions between people and natural phenomena (Zedeño, 2000). Tilley (1994: 34) distinguishes between the concepts of place and landscape, with the former emphasising difference and singularity and the latter encompassing commonalties or relationships among singular locales and events. A cultural landscape should make sense as a kind of culturally defined single area, defined by a common logic and composed of unique and connected places.
Cultural landscapes are nested (Stoffle, Halmo, and Austin, 1997; Tilley, 1994: 20). They exist at different scales but are integrated into a whole. For many American Indians, for example, these levels include, from broadest to narrowest scale, an Eventscape, a Holy Land, songscapes, regional landscapes, ecoscapes, and landmarks. The topographic criteria for defining these categories range from their fit with the natural terrain (i.e., an ecoscape) to a spiritual landscape that exists in terms of its own criteria with minimal reference to the topography of the land (i.e., a songscape).
People may attach more than one cultural landscape to a place. We call this “cultural landscape layering”. Layered cultural landscapes may have very different meanings. One landscape layer may be composed of places visited by a spiritual being. Another may involve an event such as a forced march following military conquest, as in the trail of tears for the Cherokees, the march to Bosque Redondo for the Navajos, or the march to Fort Independence for the Owens Valley Paiutes and Shoshones, all American Indian cultures.
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