When a reporter shows up to interview me about the small land trust I just founded to preserve an urban creek, and he asks the tough “why” question, I hear myself say something I’ve never even thought of before: “Because what’s good for creeks is good for people too!” Twenty years later, the truth of it only grows more clear, with climate change causing mega-storms, and rivers and creeks around the world in distress with both flooding and drought. We revisit the words of legal scholar Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Nation: We need to protect water “in the way you would protect your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your aunties.” Water is our earliest beloved, and water is life. Some meditations for increasing our love for water as well as close-to-home ideas for working for the well-being of rivers, creeks, and oceans.