Make Friends With the Water

My friend is a glamorous water witch as she bobs about in the swimming pool, still wearing sunglasses and a straw hat with a wide stiff brim, quoting Masuro Emoto about what water has to teach us.

“Water records information, and while circulating throughout the earth distributes information. This water sent from the universe is full of the information of life...”

Speak to the water, my friend suggests. It will absorb and reflect. This water is contained and may be feeling sad, but let’s remind it that it is still evaporating and will return to the air. Thank it for embracing you. Fill it with love and kindness, and it will hold you.

I realize, intellectually, that I should float. My body is not exempt from natural and physical laws that come into play here, and I will not sink like a rock to the bottom. When I imitate my friend’s bobbing motion, sort of lifting my feet up and down in the shallow end of the pool (which doesn’t seem shallow to me), I can feel a force pushing upwards against them, resisting the descent. I’m not ready to trust that this force will hold my entire body afloat, but it’s reassuring nonetheless. It’s a start.

A start is all we want, my friend says. You’re doing great!

I feel that this is unearned praise, but if my only goal is to attain some initial comfort and pleasure in water, then I suppose it applies.

Don’t attribute meanness to the water, she advises, or something along those lines. Don’t fill it with your fear.

Fear is definitely an issue here. I don’t even know the source of it, but it is fully entrenched in my psyche, and not so easy to disregard. My friend brings out a kick board, and a pair of lavender-colored foam noodles. I very much like the way the noodle hugs me, and I lean back further than I dared in the past, and experience what can only be described as a floating sensation. The sun warms my face and dapples the water and I am relaxed, but in a sweetly stoned sort of way, which probably wouldn’t be good in a dangerous aquatic situation where I had to function and save myself, and as soon as that occurs to me, I un-relax, grab the side of the pool, and become vertical and terrestrial again.

This introductory lesson is called “Make Friends With the Water.’ Nothing lofty and ambitious here. No strokes or bubble blowing yet. And let’s not even talk about breathing. But I briefly immerse my face in the water and try an unsuccessful glide. I am deaf for an instant, in an alien world that is all aqua blue and sparkling light, and maybe there is an instant of delight in this, but there is nothing to grab onto and no means of control, and the fleeting sense of delight is usurped by a sense of helplessness, and the old familiar fear.

You’re not ready for that yet, my friend concludes.

Back to the pleasure, back to the hug of the lavender noodle, and the way the water cradles me, congenial and warm.

The astonishing part is when I get out of the pool. Suddenly I am so heavy, I can barely move. Am I always this heavy in air? Is this my usual state? If so, then water can indeed lighten and unburden me. Perhaps it is exactly what I need.

We dry off in the sun, summer heat at the end of October, and the train goes by, and the dogs curl up at our legs, and we talk about environmental catastrophe, as we are prone to do, and death, but we’re having a fine time, and we know it is ungracious to repudiate bliss when bliss is offered, and maybe I will learn to swim, but all I know is that I’m coming back on Saturday and will enter the pool.