I live in a house in the woods but I can can walk to the bay. I work on an island and can walk to the bay or to the ocean, sometimes just a few steps out a door, from every house I work on, and there it is, the water. This nearness to water and access to it would make one think I am a swimmer, a floater, a rower, a boater, an enjoyer of watery related things, but I am not. I took swimming lessons as a child in our local lake and we had a pool for a time in my teens, but I never became a water person. I have dated surfers & sailors, and men who made their living on the water, but being comfortable with water never happened for me. When my mom was just 13 her little brother drowned in the bay and died. I can’t say that this is the only reason, but my mom is not a water person, and while my dad was indeed a water person when she met him, he became less so with a wife who was not. As a family, when I was a child, we went to the beach once and we went sailing once and we went canoeing once, if we did any of those things more than that, I’ve no memory of it. I had a spectacular childhood at the shore but it did not grow me into a water person. So here I am, a woman growing older in the later chapters of life near the water and I don’t take any of the pleasures the water has to give. I do however love the sound of the waves in the ocean and the ripples in the bay, I have always loved the calming song of moving water.

I read an essay recently by an Irish poet called Pádraig Ó Tuama who wrote about a place he loved to walk as a teen, “The wind, the grey, the drizzle, the salt, the spray, the wet shoes, the inadequate coat, the mediocre life, the far-away-from-everything that I felt…” and his words got me thinking, as words so often do…I am struggling right now as a woman growing older in the later chapters of life. I am deeply dissatisfied with so much and so many, including myself, and I don’t like it. It feels mediocre at best, and that is hardly a goal I think anyone ever aims for…Friends used to joke that I was the most cheerful person they knew, but these last years that person feels like she has shriveled up and died. My STARry-ness feels dulled. Mediocrity is creating melancholy. Circumstances happened to me and I am living with the consequences of those circumstances and don’t feel like myself. Sure, I have lots of happiness and joy and good in my life; I love my job and my yoga and my reading and my crocheting and my house and my girls, but if someone asked me simply if I was happy, the answer right now is not yes. All too often anymore I’m feeling a want to feel the far-away-from-everything, and that feels like a cop-out, trying to forget my troubles and ignore them rather than tackling them. And this too makes me sad because it is not who I want to be, and I don’t think it is who I am, but it’s who I have become and I find it unnerving that I’m seemingly allowing it to shape my life in such an engulfing all encompassing way…like I’ve been buried in mud, layers and layers of mud dried up and packed on month after month and now I am a fossil of my old happy, cheerful, optimistic, or hopeful self…and thinking of myself this way, and the heaviness that it leaves me with made me think of how to wash away all of that muck and mud…water

Water might be the answer. How many dozens of novels have we read where the heroine, in her grief or anger or unease, runs to the edge of the sea and the wind tangles its fingers around her hair and the salt water kisses her lips and she finds the peace or answers she was seeking in the whispers of the waves in her ears??? How many movies have we seen where the lead female character is sporting a fantastic chunky cardigan and her jeans are rolled up, just so at the ankle, and the shot zooms in as the water washes over her toes to the tops of her feet and visually washes away her worries??? She looks up to the horizon line with a bewildered expression as if thinking “wow I feel so much better now” as a John Williams score quietly rises in the background. While I have never used the water that surrounds my life as a healing modality, I’m thinking perhaps it’s time I should.

I am not blaming anyone but myself for my current state. I accept the hard truth that I too often in life did not set proper boundaries when I should have, and when I did set them I was somehow so mesmerized by other mitigating circumstances that I kept erasing the lines I had drawn. The red flags were fiercely waving right in front of me and I just became colorblind. I’ve gotten myself into something of a mess, and my love of a deep clean is such that I (me of all people for goodness sake) ought to be able to get myself out of it…cleaning up messes is what I most enjoy doing…

And so, as it was, contemplating my present tense, I had this essay show up in my email and this Irish writer found his walk to the water helped him to calm the turbulence of his thoughts that was his present tense. At yoga we call it the “monkey-mind.” And so it got me thinking, what if I began to harness to power of the water to help me calm the turbulence of thoughts that is my present tense? I had a very good friend who was a deeply devoted Christian who often told me that she got complete peace of her mind from prayer and let her prayers carry away her worries. Maybe much like old Catholic grandmas who go to church every morning to pray their rosary beads, I’ll go to the edge of the sea and experience my own interpretation of holy water?

Seriously…I have friends who surf who swear that when they are out in the water they are completely released from all of the monkey-mind, the worries, the bewilderment, they do indeed experience the far-away-from-everything when they are out there. I will be out of town for a few days next week with my sister and my daughter and we will be on and near water…I might as well begin the experiment…What if water IS holy? What if the water IS like a prayer? What if I make a point to go to the water every day I am on the island? What if I don’t let the cold or damp or rain or time of day alter my decision to do this? What if it brings me the far-away-from-everything that will help me come back to myself? What if I commit to going to the water no mater what, every day I am on the island? Maybe it will help me sort out all of the mud and muck of my thoughts and wash my mind clean? Maybe it will be for me like how a cloudy bottle can become a piece of sea glass and shine & sparkle when the light hits it just so? Maybe I need to feel the wind in my tangled hair, maybe I need to feel the spray on my face and taste the salt on my lips? Maybe I need to hear the calming song of moving water, over and over and over, and have my toes curl up from the cold and feel, what?…reborn…restored…reSTARred…maybe…