Water is the most primal of earth's elements.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters." (Genesis 1:1-2) we read in the first few verses of the book of Genesis. Water is the most plentiful of earth's elements. Close to three-quarters of our planet is water. To our knowledge, earth with its oceans is the only planet that sustains life.
"Water flows from high in the mountains.
Water runs deep in the Earth.
Miraculously, water comes to us,
and sustains all life." writes the Vietnamese poet, Thich Nhat Hanh.
The medium from which we emerged is water--in our birth as a species, in our birth as individuals. In utero, we move through a stage of development approximating a fish. As primal selves, we swim in total immersion and do not surface until birth. Yet we do not have gills.
The human body is 60% water. To live, we must sustain a minimum level of hydration. Our needs for sustenance pre and post-birth are radically different and are defined in basic ways by the form of our dependence upon water.
To swim is an act of affirming the elemental source of our being. Swimming is the most inborn human motion of the whole body. Laurel Blossom, a member here at All Souls and editor of the splendid anthology, Splash!, observes that
"When we swim we shed our higher consciousness, the complex, reasoning human organism, and remember, deep inside ourselves, the first oceanic living cell; we almost become our origins...."
To begin is to swim. To swim is to break the surface of life's beginnings.
Perhaps children learn to swim so much more readily than adults because children aren't learning. Deep inside, they are remembering. To teach children to swim is to free their remembering through pure enjoyment, through play. Though not an accomplished swimmer herself, my mother nurtured my water play. She watched me toddle out at the age of three or so to the "deep part" of the baby pool, dunk my head, splash myself and anyone who would surely think it great fun, and play contentedly the better part of an afternoon. Then summer after summer the lifeguards of our local pool taught me to swim--the Red Cross plan--beginners, advanced beginners, intermediate, etc. By the time I was 15, I was teaching other children to swim. "Open your eyes," I would coax them. "Can you imagine walking about out of the pool with your eyes closed?" And I would praise and cheer this first act of faith--seeing underwater. Then came the second act of faith, blended with just a bit of movement on the part of those less buoyant--floating. If you can float, you can swim.
To swim is to continue. Learning how to swim is remembering how to continue moving in our primal element.
Diana Nyad, one of the most famous marathon swimmers in recent years, stretches the meaning of continue. "Swimming is about endurance," she proclaims.
"....eighty percent of success in a race is due to mind....After twelve hours in cold water, my blood sugar down, I'm seventeen pounds lighter, exhausted, it takes more than knowing I've trained hard for this. I have to dig down deep."
To keep on going, one must also employ simplicity of movement and a relaxed stroke. There are strokes that are neither simple nor relaxed--like the butterfly and, for some, the backstroke. But the breast stroke and the crawl employ an economy of movement that permits a serenity of style and enables one to continue in tranquil water until the cyclical demands of hunger and sleep must be met.
Our position in water is horizontal with respect to the position we assume on land. We are buoyed by a natural medium; we hover with minimal movement. To propel ourselves through the water with a crawl, for example, we stretch to our fullest lengths without being rigid (demonstrate) and allow our hands to assume a natural curvature, with fingers slightly apart (demonstrate) to maximize the water resistance we utilize to move ahead. To breathe, we barely turn our heads--a slight swivel so that just enough of our mouth surfaces for an intake of air. Our legs move like the tail of a fish--wavelike. (demonstrate with arms) And we continue in an easy rhythm through the water.
In her poem, "400-Meter Freestyle," Maxine Kumin captures this simplicity of movement.
"....Thrift is his wonderful secret;
he has schooled out all extravagance.
No muscle ripples without compensation
wrist cock to heel snap to his mobile mouth
that siphons in the air that nurtures him
at half an inch above sea level so to speak."
A few years ago, my husband Dan and I were vacationing in Greece. Needing a few days to mellow out from the profusion of ancient ruins, we arrived at the village of Plakias on the coast of southern Crete. There we found a sparsely populated beach; we read, sunbathed, and swam. In the distance we could spot other beaches and coves and envision yet others just beyond the modest peninsulas that define the coastline. It was time for a swim.... to one of those distant beaches. Another bather with whom we had struck up conversation decided to join me.
We set out. At the most it was a couple of miles. What relish to swim through the waters of the Libyan Sea, tranquil waters, accompanied primarily by fish.....to imagine that this was where I belonged.....that swimming was simply what I did as a creature of the earth.....and then to head around promontories into waters I had never swum, to a landing that waited in my imagination....and to continue towards it, reaching it, scaling the beach like an amphibian. After a brief rest, we swam back. Such a swim well off shoreline ushers one into a dreamlike merger with the ancient and ever changing sea.
For the long distance swimmer, this dreamlike state is intensified. "My mind drifts in a mesmerized world," recounts Diana Nyad. "It's hypnotic. My subconscious comes to the fore...It's dreaming hours on end."
To swim is to extend the primordial state of our beginnings and stretch the boundaries of time.
To swim is to continue and to continue is to survive.
I am one of those who contends that swimming is a skill that is basic among life skills. This is a well tested premise. Recall this morning's reading, drawn from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's account of the shipwrecked sailor, whose last chance for survival was to swim:
"I had spent half my life in the water," says the sailor, "but it wasn't until that morning of March 9 that I understood and appreciated the importance of being a good swimmer."
The account of yet another shipwrecked sailor reaches us through the poetry of Homer. Catapulted overboard by the whims of the gods, Odysseus made his way through the sea. Ino, a divinity of mariners, spotted him and guided him through the treachery of the waves.
"You seem clear-headed still; do what I tell you.
Shed that cloak, let the gale take your craft,
and swim for it--swim hard to get ashore...
In spite of Ino's bidding and the protection of her immortal veil, Odysseus refused to swim, clinging to the ruins of his ship, until yet another immortal stirred up an earthquake, parting him from the security of his flimsy raft.
"then he slung round his chest the veil of Ino
and plunged headfirst into the sea. His hands
went out to stroke, and he gave a swimmer's kick.
...Two nights, two days, in the solid deep-sea swell
he drifted, many times awaiting death,
until with shining ringlets in the East
the dawn confirmed a third day, breaking clear
over a high and windless sea; and mounting
a rolling wave he caught a glimpse of land."
(from Book Five, Fitzgerald's translation, The Odyssey)....
To swim is to connect.
Nothing parallels that first plunge into summer's ocean. When I dive into a wave, the wave breaks like morning. Heart, mind, and body merge. I connect as a whole human being with the life sustaining element.
"....The sensation of water flowing over the body," writes Laurel Blossom, "is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath."
Is it any wonder that water is an element endowed with spirituality and healing--from the River Ganges to the River Jordan, from the Red Sea to Lourdes? In the rite of baptism, many Christians are fully immersed in this medium. When I first learned of this approach, I was perhaps four or five, just learning to swim, a resolute aquaphile, and as Presbyterian as a child of that age can possibly be. Why don't we do it that way, I wondered; what a great opportunity for a quick dip! As Unitarian Universalists, we have chosen a gentler approach--much more to Erica's liking, I'm sure, as I dedicated her moments ago with a flower whose petals were barely damp. Nonetheless, water is "the ancient symbol of this ancient rite of consecration," a symbol of connection with the source of all life.
To immerse ourselves in water is to enter an element that in the collective religious consciousness is sacred. The seas are deep, dark, mysterious, and ever changing. Humans have scaled the highest of earth's surfaces but never the depths of the sea. In this mystery lies the wonder of entering even the surface levels of an ocean, a lake, a river. We connect with depths surpassed only by cosmic space.
To swim is to imagine and to imagine is to liberate.
Water is purifying, bracing and embracing. To move completely surrounded by water, eyes open, flexing every muscle, unimpeded by a swimsuit at the most, is to unleash the imagination and liberate whatever is bound.
We hear again the words of Kenneth Patton:
"....Let us worship, not in bowing down,
not with closed eyes and stopped ears.
Let us worship with the opening of
all the windows of our beings,
with the full outstretching of our spirits.
"Swimming cultivates the imagination," writes Annette Kellerman, an early 20th century Australian swimmer and one of the greats of her day. It opens the windows of our beings and stretches our spirits. The dreamlike state reached in distance swimming draws our imagination into an even deeper sphere.
"There is nothing more democratic than swimming...." observes Kellerman. Swimming, like running, is a sport that requires in its most basic mode no equipment other than one's body. Annette Kellerman "overcame a crippling childhood disease" to become a swimming legend. Swimming first captured her imagination and then liberated her to transcend her fragile physique and reach the far shores of her dreams.
Jewell Gomez tells the story of another kind of liberation, attained through the perseverance of her grandmother in teaching her how to swim.
"The sea has been a fearful place for us. It swallowed us whole when there was no other escape from the holds of slave ships, and did so again more recently with the flimsy refugee flotillas from Haiti. To me....the ocean was a mystery of terrifying proportions. In teaching me to swim [my grandmother] took away that fear."
Jewell Gomez's "A Swimming Lesson." (LB, 66)
Her image of the ocean was transformed when she moved through it by choice.
"For to swim is also to take hold
On water's meaning, to move in its embrace,
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free."
writes poet Charles Tomlinson. I have seen a smile of euphoria fill the face of a child whose act of faith and freedom in the water is rewarded by a confidence that liberates. It is movement by choice and by will in a medium that sustains us.
Swimming is beginning, continuation, survival, connection, imagination, liberation.
"Miraculously, water comes to us, and sustains all life." Miraculously, we move through water. It is only natural, doing what we remember and refining what we do. We swam before we were human and, as Kellerman prophesies, "we will swim till there is no more sea."
As the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters, creation dawned and it was good. How good it is to move through these waters, to open our primal gills. How good it is to open all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.
Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998