Water is the first subject of "Fluyendo," and it stays the subject for the full run of this unplugged performance, filmed in Brasil and published on Ayla Schafer's channel on June 25, 2020. The video runs a little over six minutes and carries no spoken introduction in the material available for this piece, so the reading here rests on what the song itself says: its Spanish lyrics, the English translation published alongside them, and the credits, which name Barbara Machado as filmmaker and editor and list Joshua Wenzl as a featured collaborator. Taken together, the words describe water as a healer, a teacher, a voice to be listened to, and a model for how a person might move through life. The song asks the singer to become like it.
The title is the Spanish verb for "flowing," and the whole song is built around that single motion. The chorus repeats it three times in a row, "Fluyendo, fluyendo, fluyendo," and the repetition does what a mantra does: it slows the attention until the word stops being a word and becomes a rhythm. The song's English translation renders the line as "Flowing, flowing, flowing," followed by "Singing your mysterious song" and "Dancing the cycles of life."
What makes the lyric more than a nature poem is its grammar of address. Nearly every verse speaks directly to water. "Agua Hermosa, permiso para orar" opens the song with a request: beautiful water, permission to pray. The singer is not describing a river from a distance. She is asking the river for leave to enter into prayer, which places water in the position of a host or elder rather than a resource.
Several lines name water in relational terms. The verse "Llevando tu bendición, curandera femenina" carries the translation "Carrying your blessing, female healer," so water is cast as a feminine healer who brings blessing with her. A later line, "Sangre de la Tierra, agua es la vida," reads in translation as "Blood of the Earth, water is life," tying water to the body of the planet itself. The image is circulatory: water runs through the earth the way blood runs through a body, and life depends on both.
The closing verse makes the maternal frame explicit. "Madre enséñame, guía mi camino," the translation gives as "Mother teach me, guide my path." The singer is not asking for water to be ornamental or merely soothing. She is asking to be taught, and she identifies water as the one who teaches. That is a particular kind of humility: the student goes to the river the way a child goes to a parent.
The center of "Fluyendo" is a short, almost plain stanza that works like an affirmation:
"Yo seré como el agua. Transparente como el agua. Fluida como el agua. Clara y pura como el agua."
"I'll be like water. Transparent as water. Fluid as water. Clear and pure as water." (Translation as published in the video description.)
Four qualities are named: transparency, fluidity, clarity, and purity. Each one is a quality of the inner life as much as of the physical stream. Transparency suggests nothing is hidden behind the self; fluidity suggests the capacity to adapt to a shape without losing identity; clarity and purity suggest a mind that has settled enough for light to pass through it. The grammar matters too. The line is in the future tense, "seré," I will be. The song is not claiming a state already achieved. It is setting a direction and a practice.
The next verse extends this into a kind of trust. "A fluir con confianza, ser como el río," the translation renders as "To flow with trust, to be like the river." Flow is presented not as passivity but as confidence. A river does not know where it will end, and it keeps moving. The singer asks to move that way too.
Listening is the hinge of the second half. "Agua, escuchando tu voz," the song says: water, listening to your voice. The verb is the important one. The singer is not only hearing water but attending to it, and the next line claims that water is "Hablando en la lengua de la creación," speaking in the language of creation. Water is framed as a speaker of an original language, one the singer must learn to hear before she can sing back.
The final verses make the relationship reciprocal. "Vengo a escuchar a los secretos del agua" means "I come to listen to the secrets of water," and "Vengo a cantar con el misterio del agua" means "I come to sing with the mystery of water." The sequence is listen first, then sing. Song in this framing is not performance laid over silence. It is a response to something already speaking.
The song ends with a list of names: "Madre agua, Yakumama, Agua Sagrada, Mni Wakan." The published credits note that "Mother Water" is rendered in Quechua as Yakumama and that "Sacred Water" appears in Lakota as Mni Wakan. Setting these names side by side is a deliberate choice. The Spanish-language core of the song is joined by names from two Indigenous languages, one Andean and one from the Great Plains, and the effect is a chorus of names for the same element. No single tongue holds water; the song gathers several to honor it.
For a listener, this is worth sitting with. Naming water in more than one language is a way of admitting that the sacred is larger than any one vocabulary. It also reminds the listener that these are not interchangeable labels. Each name carries its own relationship and its own history, and the song lets them stand next to one another rather than merging them into a generic "water spirit."
The "unplugged" label in the title signals a choice of sound over amplification, and that choice suits the material. A song about flowing water and the act of listening to it benefits from being heard close up, without the density of a full mix between the singer and the listener. The repetition of "fluyendo" lands more directly when it is not competing with a backing track. The credits list a filmmaker and editor, which means the image is part of the composition too, and an unhurried six-minute frame gives the song room to breathe.
Because the material for this piece does not include a transcript or spoken commentary, it would be wrong to attribute to the singer any particular intention about the performance beyond what the lyrics and credits say. What can be said with confidence is that the song asks for attention, offers water as its teacher, and closes by naming the element in several languages at once.
The most direct way to deepen the experience is to read the Spanish and the English side by side, then sing the chorus slowly and notice what changes when the word "fluyendo" is repeated. Many listeners find that the simplest line, "Clara y pura como el agua," becomes a small practice when held in the body: a reminder to check whether the mind is cloudy or clear. The song also invites a further step. If the names Yakumama and Mni Wakan are new, learning where they come from, and from whom, is part of taking the song seriously rather than treating it as a pleasant sound.
Start with the video itself, then return to the lyrics with the translation open. Listen once for the chorus, once for the verse about listening, and once for the closing list of names. The artist's own pages carry more of her work: her website is aylaschafer.co.uk, and her music is available on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Spotify, as linked in the video description. Her Medicine Music performances are collected on the channel, which is where "Fluyendo" sits among them. For a reader new to the song, the most useful next step is simple: play it with the water running, or sit near a river, and let the line "Yo seré como el agua" be the question you carry out of the room.
