A while ago a friend asked if I was Air or Earth or Fire or Water. She would not say why she wanted to know, which I thought was a bit weird, but not as strange as her having to ask the question. I would have thought anyone who knows me would know that my base element is water, with flash-threads of fire and air.
None of my wish lists is complete without “the light on the water”, most of them start with it. You only get the dancing quicksilver if you combine fire (light), air (the breeze) with the surface of the water. Nothing dances in stillness. None of us are all one thing…but I believe we are one main thing. If I cannot have the light and the air, I will be happy to settle for the water.
Obviously we are talking metaphorically or metaphysically here…I’m not planning to stop breathing or attempt to become a mermaid.
Like most people I froze for a moment when lockdown was announced, trying to work out what it would mean, but as soon as knew that we would be allowed to walk each day, I knew that my sanity was saved. Living where I do, I knew I could walk to the water. Through the worst of the restrictions, I did, every day. I walked along the river and round the lake and dreamed of getting back to the sea. The sea would wait; I was grateful for the river and the lake.
When the hot spring morphed into the wet of early summer, I wandered the woods catching raindrops from the trees.
My friend told me that she needed to be near water. It seemed a strange kind of need. She lives not so far away, but she didn’t seek out the quiet spots where no-one walked, or hardly anyone, often only me, where the light danced with dragonflies, and trees bowed down to drink, where fish hung still in the shallows, and iris and waterlilies grew. A strange kind of need, I thought, that when it could so easily be met, wasn’t.
I’m not sure whether I have also claimed to need to be near water, to crave the sight and sound of it, but I do know that it calls to me. I cannot imagine putting myself to the test of being beyond reach of it. So many of my childhood memories are wrapped in salt water or swimming pools or cataracts or ice-cold lochs. So many of my soul-mate memories involve beach walks or rain.
And so this week has been a good week, because it has been a watery one.
I went to the beach and found that the tide was high. With a strong onshore breeze, the waves were breaking. Crashing. Dancing. It is hard to tell an angry crash from a joyful leap, if you are not a wave yourself. Sun-caught spume shone brilliant against the granite-grey of gathering swell. Grey, or brown, or a dull camouflage green. Not sea colours traditionally, but a suitable backdrop for breaking white. Sea-birthed clouds of water wildly waltzing with the sky.
The water was cold. Child me would have rushed in anyway, to try to swim, but on that kind of day, simply to relish the power of the waves. I am hoping to recapture that spirit, that joy of knowing the world in which we live, and how small we are against it, in a more positive way than we have had to face up to it in recent weeks and months. To reach out and touch the planet, to stand with it, know my place in it.
As it was, I merely paddled, and got only slightly, significantly, wetter than intended. Drying in the breeze, salt-marked trails on skin and clothes. Smiling. Knowing that child me is still in here somewhere, asking to be let out to play.
On another day I ventured back to the newly re-opened swimming pool, which felt somehow braver than standing in the waves. I hadn’t fully understood the instructions about where bags must be left, and which steps must be used and got it wrong. A fellow swimmer warned me that I might be “shouted at” or at least “spoken to” as he explained my mistake. He’d had been the previous week. I wasn’t. But the possibility unnerved me for the rest of my swim, ashamed of having broken the rules. Unwittingly, but even so.
Such reservations aside, it was bliss to be back in the water. I’m not a great swimmer…not a strong one, not a fast one, not even a stylistically graceful one…but slowly stroking my way up and down is another of those activities which bring me close to meditation. Enough movement and focus on breathing and counting of lengths to keep the monkey-mind happy, while my consciousness slips into neutral.
On yet another day there were tears. It was International Friendship Day during the week – how sad that we need such a thing. I turned on the radio and caught shared stories of friends simply being friends, doing what needed to be done, and very soon I wept. Crying at pain and beauty that were not mine, but which touched that part of me that recognised them, that had been there and done that…recognising the pain, and also the holding of space for others. I have maybe not been as good at the latter as I might have been at times, and maybe that is another part of our common pain – that maybe most of us share the knowledge of not always having been the one to do what was needed. And yet somehow we muddle through.
Is it an age thing, that we measure our friendships by the pain they have helped us through? The friendships of our early years don’t seem marked that way, we don’t remember the pain, but no doubt it was there. We remember the joy, the fun, the silliness, the stupidity, the risks, the laughter and the hope. I remember the plans we made.
Was some of the reason I was so moved by the stories, a lament for the loss of all that, the summer sheen of early friendships, long since lost on divergent paths? Or do we, as Brené Brown suggests, weep for others we do not know, in some subconscious hope that in doing so we take on some of their pain, that they may bear it more easily? Except, I think we also weep in the face of beauty, of knowing that such goodness still survives in a world that often feels overwhelmed with anger, frustration and unfounded hate. In a world of fear, trust and love still abound. And I’m sentimental enough to be moved by knowing that. We weep with relief.
Salt water, and chlorinated, and then a little more salt. A watery week is definitely a good week.
