The hardest part is first: the choice to jump or dive, the purposeful, against base instinct launching into air towards a chill, shimmering, unknown surface. The body knows once the choice has been made, nothing will remain the same- submersion is never partial and the motion, once started, cannot be halted. But then you are in the water, and every surface receptor, your facial skin, arms, belly, skull cries out with the exquisite change in temperature and sensation and you are reborn.
Before I left London last week I went swimming at the Women’s Pond in the Heath with a lively gang of women awake (I emphasize that as it was before most folks have rolled out of bed, these women regularly hit the trails then the water in a breath – drawing ritual of immersion) to the wonders of the world around them.
As I travel and prepare new studies coming in London and Paris, I am so sharply aware of place and self-propulsion, the launching out, the sensitivity to where I am, the way in which the widening circle around you is a keen interaction of what you create and offer melded to an awareness of where you are.
My younger students gifted me Wild Swimming by Daniel Start to join my collection of books celebrating the electrifying experience of plunge into live waters. This joins Wild Swim by Kate Rew, a beautiful testimony to all the lovely outdoor swims available in England- reading her descriptions of great swims across this Island makes me want to stay here forever–or at least until I have done all these swims. The introduction also got me thinking about how the act of plunging into water is that recurring, almost cliché metaphor for committing to a thing. Going more deeply (please excuse the punning- I cannot help myself), I think about how the moment of diving in means crossing boundaries, from our air-filled world to a watery realm, from the known experience of earth and stable objects to the fluidity and flux of moving liquid. My body knows I cannot live there, but I am hungry for the immersion, for the testing of time under water, for the discovery of what I cannot see on the surface, for the change in light and smell and feeling. How apt for any new undertaking, for any project or experience that requires the whole-hearted commitment of oneself without seeing where you will land!
So without having all the pieces in place, without knowing if it will work, we dive in– to new relationships, towards new goals, to new projects…the Salon offering a program for a dating service? Teaching Ulysses in the psycho-therapeutic community? Offering a Salon to a community in need healing? The fear and the possibility of the new…
Will it work? Can we do it? Too late- the body arcs, the earth is left behind.
I will be out of London from mid-July into August- travelling, writing, reading and swimming with Madeline- but will check email regularly. Please email me if you have questions, comments or feedback of any sort.
See you in the pages…
