What Wikipedia says about water(abridged):

Water cycle

The biosphere can be roughly divided into oceans, land, and atmosphere.

Water moves perpetually through each of these regions in the water cycle consisting of following transfer processes:

-evaporation from oceans and other water bodies into the air and transpiration from land plants and animals into air.
 -precipitation, from water vapor condensing from the air and falling to earth or ocean.
 -runoff from the land usually reaching the sea

Most water vapor over the oceans returns to the oceans, but winds carry water vapor over land at the same rate as runoff into the sea, about 36 Tt per year. Over land, evaporation and transpiration contribute another 71 Tt per year. Precipitation, at a rate of 107 Tt per year over land, has several forms: most commonly rain, snow, and hail, with some contribution from fog and dew. Condensed water in the air may also refract sunlight to produce rainbows.

Water runoff often collects over watersheds flowing into rivers. Some of this is diverted to irrigation for agriculture. Rivers and seas offer opportunity for travel and commerce. Through erosion, runoff shapes the environment creating river valleys and deltas which provide rich soil and level ground for the establishment of population centers.

Water is considered a purifier in most religions. Major faiths that incorporate ritual washing (ablution) include Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Shinto. Water baptism is a central sacrament of Christianity; it is also a part of the practice of other religions, including Judaism (mikvah) and Sikhism (Amrit Sanskar). In addition, a ritual bath in pure water is performed for the dead in many religions including Judaism and Islam. In Islam, the five daily prayers can be done in most cases after completing washing certain parts of the body using clean water (wudu). In Shinto, water is used in almost all rituals to cleanse a person or an area (e.g., in the ritual of misogi). Water is mentioned in the Bible 442 times in the New International Version and 363 times in the King James Version: 2 Peter 3:5(b) states, “The earth was formed out of water and by water” (NIV).

Some faiths use water especially prepared for religious purposes (holy water in some Christian denominations, Amrit in Sikhism and Hinduism). Many religions also consider particular sources or bodies of water to be sacred or at least auspicious; examples include Lourdes in Roman Catholicism, the Zamzam Well in Islam and the River Ganges (among many others) in Hinduism. In Neo-Paganism water is often combined with salt in the first steps of a ritual, to act as a purifier of worshippers and the altar, symbolising both cleansing tears and the ocean.

Water is often believed to have spiritual powers. In Celtic mythology, Sulis is the local goddess of thermal springs; in Hinduism, the Ganges is also personified as a goddess, while Saraswati have been referred to as goddess in the Vedas. Also water is one of the “panch-tatva”s (basic 5 elements, others including fire, earth, space, air). Alternatively, gods can be patrons of particular springs, rivers, or lakes: for example in Greek and Roman mythology, Peneus was a river god, one of the three thousand Oceanids. In Islam, not only does water give life, but every life is itself made of water: “We made from water every living thing”.
The Greek philosopher Empedocles held that water is one of the four classical elements along with fire, earth and air, and was regarded as the ylem, or basic substance of the universe. Water was considered cold and moist. In the theory of the four bodily humors, water was associated with phlegm. Water was also one of the five elements in traditional Chinese philosophy, along with earth, fire, wood and metal.

What I say about water:

Water in most magical/metaphysical frameworks in feminine.  Water is what we are predominantly made of, what this planet is predominantly covered in, and what naturally washes CO2 out of the atmosphere, into the seas and lakes and rivers where it eventually bonds with the sediment and other carbon.  Water is also the element of emotion, security, sexuality, and just as the moon rules water and affects the tides on the planet and in people, the condition of our water is manifest in traits of the human psyche.  We, just like the planet, are 70% water.  Too often this is overlooked.  Water is a living ecosystem as well, teeming with organisms of all sizes.    Two things we do our water that need to stop are clorination and flouridation.  Chlorine breaks up vitamin E, which a lack of can lead to cancer, cataracts, macular degeneration, alzheimers and parkinson’s disease.   Flouride inhibits the bodies natural ability to heal tooth decay (you heard that right, cavities can heal themselves if you consume enough silica) and it has never been shown to prevent anything, flourine is the stuff that has been shown to halt tooth decay, but what we put into city water is flouride.  On top of that flouride is banned in most European countries and is classified as a tranquilizer in oriental medicine.  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it for awhile.  They’re putting tranquilizers in our water.   So often people want to sterilize everything but what they don’t realize is that the chemicals used to do so are equally as harmful to us as whatever organism they were intended to kill.  Toxins and chemicals build up in our bodies and can be linked to all sorts of stuff.   On the topic of peoples obsession with sterilization I should bring up another point.  Little bacteria mutate, and they want to survive no matter how inhospitable an environment they are presented with.  You can never kill 100% of anything(that’s why that bottle of lysol says 99.99%) and so that remaining percent adapts and learns to thrive on your newly sanitized countertop.  But these little guys are something entirely new because they had to mutate to survive.  Now couple this with the fact that there is beneficial bacteria and there is harmful bacteria.  You need things like acidophillus to live, otherwise you cannot digest things.  Also 70% of your immune system is in your intestines.    Whether you like it or not we are infested with bacteria, I think that just as we are a combination of atoms, our life comes from the combination of all these little organisms (mitochondria were bacteria that were assimilated into cells).   What is outside gets inside your body by one means or another and by sanitizing your home you created a world of mutant bacteria that can thrive off of the toxic chemicals you saturated it with.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  Those mutant bacteria get inside you and reek havoc on your immune system, especially if antibiotics are added into the mix.  True health comes when you can recognize that you cannot just kill off bacteria, we need them to live.  What you have to do is learn to create and environment where the healthy ones survive and shut out the harmful ones for you.  Eating a diet of whole pure foods is the best way to do this.  Water is the same deal.  We need to cultivate a healthy living water supply as opposed to trying to kill everything off and in the process slowly killing ourselves.  In our culture of excessive meat eating which leads to overheated bodies, temperments etc, algae (chorella, spirulina and wild blue-green) counteract by being extremely cooling.  If our water ecosystems were pure and we were able to drink out of the streams and such like our ancestors, we would naturally consume low levels of algae constantly, reaping their health benefits.  Also these algaes encourage that healthful intestinal flora I was talking about in addition to being having the highest concentrations of B vitamins and protiens of any natural food and generous amounts of iron and fatty acids that are essential to healthy nervous system function.  The chlorophyll molecule is identical to the hemoglobin molecule except for the fact it has magnesium instead of iron as the central atom.  So it is the natural treatment of choice for anemia.  That’s in addition to the trace minerals found in natural spring water. 

    Hopefully I’ve proven my point that a lot more attention needs to be paid to our water.  We need to start removing dams so our rivers can purify themselves and work on cultivating healthy LIVING water ecosystems.  Water is so completely fundamental, it would fix most of the problems we are having on this planet right now.  As I have said water is the element of the unconcious and just as our collective unconcious is riddled with problems, our natural world is a reflection of that.  People think we are separate but we are all one.  Just as the Gaia theory states, the Earth and all of her children are one gigantic, dynamic, self regulating organism.  If we heal ourselves we will heal the earth and vice versa.