By the Water
ancestral ties, memory, and the creative tides of life
July drips with heat and potential. Come find flow in your creative process: sign up for this week’s paper marbling workshops. Pretend this email is a message in a bottle flowing down a river — share this with a creative collaborator or curious friend.
By the water, the world wakes. Waves surround the thin ankles of a single gull, river water swaying up creating symphonies against a rock glass beach to a constellating audience of preening geese. Across the river, a bridge; beyond the bridge, buildings, tall on the horizon — monuments in the distance to existence, where we rise and splash water against our half sleeping faces to greet the morning.
Watching the waves, I remember water as teacher; nothing is static. To watch a wave crest and fall is never the same form. Each step and sliver of river in focus, I try to understand the current, lost in the constant hum of waves taking form. With water, as with life, change is constant.
In the heat, I watch the water of my body pool up and drip down to the earth below. Sweat rises, falls, like the breath and I think of Sundays by the ocean. At the cafe on the corner in the morning a man stands, rocking a baby to sleep, reminiscing about coastal summers, East Coast versus West. “It’s too hot in the city,” he says, swaying. “Too much concrete. Too dense. In this heat? You want to be by the water.”
He’s not wrong. I sit and I remember water and shorelines — East Coast, Midwest, West Coast; a trickle of past time flows into present experience. Memories of tide pools, freshwater, oceans, river, and lakes. I am child in the Atlantic swimming away from the lifeguard. I am in a Midwest pool determined to be mermaid. I am teenager rowing canoe along the shorelines of Maryland. I am twenty five, twenty six, thirty two marbling paper for Odette Press, marveling at the nature of water as it’s moving. Ink, water, breath, print. By the water is where I am revived more times than not.
I have always felt connected to water. Water is soothing, balm, calming. Salt water, rivers, pools in the yard ran through my ancestral lines and childhood. Odette andher memories of Beirut and the beach. Sandcastles, sandwiches, sunburns. Earth piled soft and glistening in the sunlight. My earliest memory of crafting a personal relationship with anything vaguely larger than life — spiritual or cosmic — was in the water. Feet on the soft earth, wet sand, pools of salt water forming in footsteps. I remember dragging my then ten year old legs through the water, feeling the force of a riptide like being held in closeness, and sensing the water teeming with story and wisdom. Despite growing up going to Catholic church, my connection to devotion in any formal, organized way has ebbed and released over time. A shifting shoreline. Despite this, water — and nature as a whole — still feels holy.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about the relationship with self, earth, and body — how our psyches and bodies store memories, how our creativity is a river within us that is our task to clear out, revive, and tend. “The body remembers,” she writes, “the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream”.
In the morning, I press handfuls of water to waking skin. In the afternoon, I watch as the body’s dew takes form. Sweat. Heat. Summer. Feet pressing against the earth, city street, the ground, under the same sun that touched the eyes and skin of everyone who’s ever lived, my ancestors and yours, watching the skylines and the water. We are nature, and nature is teacher, and the water remembers. Be like wave: inhale — pull back. Exhale — try again. Be like ocean: movement, constant, with variations. Embody river: flow.
This season: sit by the water. Write a letter. Share it with a friend. Start off with the line “by the water…”. Notice what flows through. Write your aspirations, what your senses say, your stories. Reflect on your memories of shorelines.
By the water is where we’ll be this week for workshops. Ink, breath, water, paper, prints — sign up for suminagashi, and explore the waters of your creative life.
classes and upcoming experiences
come explore your creative practice in nyc and beyond
for paid subscribers:
nourished by, nourishing:
Rockaway Sundays, breath practice, beach. Friends, shorelines, and community. Learning to adapt and shift like the tides. Reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Revived by sleeping, often, and early. A video of my practice and process from the archives. For more, follow @OdettePress
a community note and offering:
Curious to integrate ancestral wisdom, embrace interdisciplinary practice, and apply this to business, home, and community? Apply to Lineage in Praxis, a 4-month in person and virtual apprenticeship for interdisciplinary medicine weavers by Joyell of
. Those of you who have been here for some time may remember our collaborative release — the Sojourn Journals from a few years ago. Applications for this container are curated by Joyell (@WriterintheTub) Apply by July 17studio views:
