Today I had one of those moments that makes me miss the summer before it is even gone. I went down to Jersey Lake and just decided to swim for as far as I thought my body could take me, which as it turns out, is pretty far! As I was on my way to the far end of the lake, I came across a rope swing. As I swung out over the shimmering waters, I was instantly transported back in time to when I was a little boy and my father put me on the rope that used to hang from an old stout timber near De Sotos Third Pond. It was great. As I swam back towards the beach, I stopped in the middle of the lake and just enjoyed the tranquil weightlessness of being in the water, the stoic solitude of having no one else around me, the deep blue of the cloudless sky and the swallows & sparrows that cut through my field of vision as they made their twisting turns through that azure tableaux. A few of those aerial acrobats came so close to my face that I had to whistle a warning to them to let them know that my face was no landing strip! After what seemed eternity, I decided I should probably swim back to shore. The oppressiveness of leaving the water and feel the worlds weight added back into mine made me wish I could just go back in. It made me think that dolphins and whales had the right idea all along. Millennia ago, they said goodbye to the land and went back into the water. I think they were onto something. I really wish I lived in a place where I could have these moments all year long. Sure, I could get a membership to a place were they have lap swims indoors during the deep dark days of winter, but I have always felt like swimming laps were just another way of taking something that was always about exploration and connection to earth, and sterilizing it, making it mundane, dull, repetitive. The world has enough of these entrapments. Well if anything, the winter is always there to make these moments mean more than they would if they were offered to me regularly, I suppose. The bitter aperitif of winter to lead eventually to the sweet, sweet dessert that is a summertime swim in a lake on the edge of nowhere.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 03:51:44 +0000
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