Keep It Moving: Nya’s Story
Nya Shahir at Carkeek Park. Portrait by Chloe Collyer.
“My connection to water is really looking at it from a couple of different aspects. Like, stuff that I’ve learned from the past, and how it’s benefited me and healed me. And then also stuff that I’m learning. Because there’s always something new to learn around water and what it really is.
I remember years ago looking at it from the perspective of how water heals in the body. It’s basic things like drinking clean water, having access to clean water, bathing. All of those things where it became interesting to me because I was looking at injustices around things that were happening in like, Flint, Michigan. Around these basic necessities that people really need. We need food. We need clean water, we need love, and good housing, you know? These are fundamental things that are hard for us to sometimes access.
Water for me, not only does it have the healing aspect, it also has a memory, it has ancestral connections to the past, and then moving to the future, how it heals us.
I was thinking about when we went to the ocean and then we would go to the forest and that connection. And then I started to really just think in my head ‘there is no separation,’ there’s never a separation. And this idea of having a backyard with fences and all of the things that seem like there are borders: there are no borders. There are no borders; water is always flowing through every single thing.
So I think neighboring with people and being connected to our community, it’s really empowering to go to your neighbor, go to the people that live near you and go, ‘we can support each other in this, you know, like cleaning the ecosystem.’”
Nya Shahir at Carkeek Park. Portrait by Chloe Collyer.
“Hi, my name is Nya Shahir (she/they), and it’s been an honor to be restored to higher states of consciousness by the elements of the earth and specifically water for me, as that is been a big component of my healing and the healing work that I do for others.”
