Variations On Water
An essay in parts, for seven years of Odette Press
This week’s essay is a celebration of sorts: an experiment in form, focusing on the lessons from water learned alongside seven years of the journey of starting and sustaining Odette Press. I’m grateful for everyone who has been a part of this. As always, you can listen to these essays in podcast form here. To support this work, share these with a friend, become a paid subscriber, or pair your creative practice with a journal. Sign up for upcoming workshops in person in Chicago.
“I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
― John O'Donohue
One, Drop
You start with water. Take a cup and fill the vessel to the brim, watching how drop after drop gathers. Sipping is a dialogue between oxygen, hydrogen, and your inner world, and as you drink, you meditate on water. Each drip converges with the flow of your consciousness; water and mind are two streams flowing, and “intention is the force that keeps consciousness ordered”1. From water, all of life is forming.
Two, Shock
My intention is to stay focused, and so, at eleven in the morning, before the heat swells and crashes over the apartment, I turn on the stove, then pull two eggs from a boil, immediately submerging both in a bath of ice water, the pair with two patient cubes of ice — a process of shocking the eggs so the hardened shell slides off the viscous surface with ease.
Later, driving up the highway that washes against the shoreline, I watch as people unfold themselves, unwinding from the masks of their days to be by water. I get it now. I understand the lakeshores, the oceans, the appeal of waves, and the fronts of rain that roll down the clear cut to sky of window. Water revives us. We find it for solace. We sip from it to cool down, to awe, to help us fine some semblance of serenity, to soften our way down and out and into life. Water’s rhythms can shake something loose, tapping us out of the shells we’ve constructed around ourselves, breaking us down and out so something new can emerge. Sometimes water cools, and sometimes we submerge ourselves in it, a way into our own interior, so we can soften, and take off our own hardened shells. I cook the eggs for seven minutes.
Three, Water/Breath
One way to work with water is to cleanse. You stand in the shower, and/or you cry, and either way the waters wash you, inside and outside. The second way is to sweat — to find the way your body languages in salinity — and the third is to breathe with the waves: you, finding your momentum, coax your way out of the house and pour yourself, weary or otherwise, onto your nearby streets. Go for a run, or else find some momentum, a rhythm that makes it so whatever angles and sharps you emerges from your skin as something softer: salt, sweat, your own water forming. By the end, you glimmer and sit, watching reflections of atmosphere as weather patterns its way off the mirror of rivers, oceans, lakes. Waves and breath arise and dissolve. The practice is this: inhale as the waves come up. Exhale as you watch them leave.
Four, Both Coasts
I formed my business from a sip of an idea — a single drop of wonder that condensed and pouring into my psyche slowly, then swelled into life by way of time by tide pools, oceans, shorelines, rivers, lakes. Water drips, rushes, floods, flows, and whether "eager to undertake” or “a prompt to attempt," to be enterprising is what one must enter into the flow of ideation. A business can stabilize, or pour into you so you grow, too, or else be a mirror and reflect back to you, as with a lake’s glassy surface, the contents of your own atmosphere. The early French word for enterprise flows as if an estuary into entrepreneur, and like an essay is an attempt, I poured minute, hour, month, year into my business so I could, in time, visit with my own body and mind, cleansed between the the parenthesis of coastlines. East Coast to West, I drove, I sense, to take my own two sides — to take family and history, to take the forces of opposites, to bring flow back to my body and mind — and in time, flow with life, find revival, restore myself in the river of living, and stitch myself back together.
Five, Pouring In
What is the nature of water? I watch as life roils. I watch the exchange of business and teaching. I pour into my students; drops of water form, flow, flood, as ideas and understanding are streams converging. Communities flow, and we gather our consciousness and attention around in circles and tables. Tending a business is a process of pouring. I teach my students to paint on water, but the biggest teacher is water itself: how one way to mediate an obstacle is to wear it down, as is the case of canyons formed by millions of years of water over time, or else find a way to flow around it. Walking with water, I learn to carry each moment slowly. Water tells me I’ll stay serene the slower I go. I lessen the hold I think I have, at all moments, on any kind of control. Water works around obstacles, and sings wisdom. I listen.
Six, To Hold
For water to be held, there is a ground, and the force of gravity, and sometimes something pulls you onward or down, as in the flow of life, or the gravity of a situation. That pull could be an insight, or a force that magnetizes, as in an idea, or something forming: an idea for a product, for a color, or a collection.
Water falls, and moves enough to carve mountains, and moves in all directions. All particles of water are constantly in motion, and those that vibrate at a pace fast enough break free from the tension of surface and rise and evaporate. The story of water continues, and what rises falls later as rain, seeping into the soil of roses, fruit trees, all life growing.
I learn how to find a rhythm for living and business that sustains. I am a wave now, iterating and returning. On my hardest days I’ve wanted to break down — become a stream, dissolve, or break into a cascade into a thousand drops. Instead, I look to water; I find solace, momentum. Tears make way for some water to fall so whatever within you that can rise can do so more easily; this is release, and I think, if we listen closely, this is what the songs of our tears can say. But the recipe for life is this: you need space, you need air, you need sunlight, as does everything, and you need water, too. “Even the root of recipe — the Latin recipere — implies an exchange, a giver and a receiver.” writes Leonardi, “Like a story, a recipe needs a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason to be”.
Seven, Revive
Take a cup of water. Hold it, like an idea, in reverence, and sip it carefully between your palms. Drinking water, you slow down, and feel the way each sip slips its way down your throat, coaxed across your tongue. Water revives you: you receive each drop, and find that which restores you, and in seven years of business, I have overfilled, overflowed, felt the increase of psychic drought, and understood more deeply that which is creatively hydrating. The recipe for living is one of flowing between states of being: giving and receiving. What matters? I ask myself each year. It’s the question, or else the running force, like water, that guides me. I become water the more I practice, and business is a river, a stream that flows, or else teaches me about the nature of obstacles, and how to adapt and soothe and soak and flow around. So I start with the flow of breathing. I start with water. I fill up the glass.
From A Past Season:
Thank you!
For everyone who’s been a part of this the last seven years. In honor of the season’s produce, the nature of water, and the colors in the Odette Press collections, I made a blueberry, sumac, lemon granita, served with a tangy vanilla yogurt whipped cream.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. Walks to the river, longer runs to the lake. “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie” by Susan J. Leonardi, excerpted above, by way of Alicia Kennedy.
From Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Happy birthday and congratulations on seven years of Odette Press! I love your journals, and I hope to take part in an in-person workshop one day. Sending lots of love from Switzerland!