Waves and Waves
A Movement from Rivers to Lakes
As the summer starts, we slow down. July experiences have arrived to the calendar. Sign up to join in for workshops in Chicago. Paid subscribers received videos in a four part series this month, Culivating Curiosity, a guided experience combining meditation with writing to spark your sense of connection and inquiry. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen to these essays in podcast form here, share with a friend, or pair your creative practice with a journal from Odette Press.
“Be wild. That is how to clear the river.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
“And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
Singing.”
— Mary Oliver, from ‘The River Clarion’
I didn’t understand the vastness of Lake Michigan, didn’t comprehend the beauty of the water until I could feel it in front of me, standing still, heart pounding with summer and running and morning, watching the waves push against the shoreline.
On a Tuesday morning, the sand is soft, golden honey. The water is crystal, and clear as if glass in motion; my eyes are clear and astonished. Waves and waves and waves pattern up on the edges of sand and shoreline. My gaze meets a tranquil cobalt blue of lake, a beat against edges of sand. Blue, endless against the gray blue of sky. I put my hand in the water. The only edge is the hard line of horizon.
Water teaches how to shift: shows how to adapt around obstacles, to drip through tight spaces, to find rhythm, to flow across time, to lap toward that which bares repeating. When heated, water gives us cooking, and we take what matter is tough, and with time, bring it to some softness. Water revives, cleanses, reminds of that which is tranquil and if ever I am too far inland, my body snakes its way back to the water. Lakes, rivers, oceans, showers, and cups of water nourish and sustain. Given the choice as a child I would spend hours and hours and hours by the ocean; now I find revival in balancing between the languages of cities and activities, rivers and lakes. The East River in its deep, azure and emerald; and now, Lake Michigan with its clear, cool blue, a cobalt cerulean. Water matters, and bodies of water revive our bodies and minds, comprised of earth, water, matter.
As July swells, I watch as sweat drips, as days glisten and illuminate in the heat of the season. I hear water drop from the shower, later hearing rain, both reminders of water’s language, rhythm, singing. Waves lap up on soft beach and rivers run and estuary in the spaces between shorelines of oceans and skylines of cities. I watch as rain beads down, condensing against windows, and hear as water fills cups, pouring into stomachs or plots of soil. I notice how my thoughts languish and slow in the thick of heat, or in the absence of water, and I take a sip, feeling then the inspiration rising. Ideas, once hydrated, flourish, and move, soaring as if an evening’s swallow, diving down toward the gold of sunset on the surface of water, then launching toward clouds, both bird and water in motion against the dripping painting of evening. Peach, pink, lilac, gray to blue: sky to water, painted against the evening’s mirror.
On Sunday, I moved to Chicago. It was a choice I made in motion, running along the East River, finding stillness, turning toward that which makes a flow state. It was a choice that lapped against me until I took the shorelines of which was muddy and sat with the ideas, the feelings, the choices until the flow ran clean.
Water drips, rushes, floods, flows. To flow is to move fluidly from one moment to the next. Flow is a channel, a river, a stream, a lake in continual motion. Flow is the state that Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi says can pour into our lives by swimming into a sense of immersion. Flow is the dialogue of breath leaving body, becoming sky, then finding a tide back, inhaled again. The water in our bodies teaches us to express so that whatever is built up can flow. Flowing toward the ground, rain and tears equally fall down from face and sky, relieving pressure, restoring the ground and all things below, growing.
I learn to city, I learn to river, I learn to ocean, and now, I learn to lake. I consider the container ground creates; the way the void of landscape formed, stable enough to hold the fluidity of this great body of water as it undulates. I take water and revive it through dried cakes of color and ink and coax brushes and lines and shapes across the page. I find solace in the stream of thinking. I learn to watch my thoughts as water, becoming revived in the witnessing. I sit at the shoreline and watch the waves come in: East River, Atlantic Ocean, and now Lake Michigan, or even the way the rain falls. Water teaches us about letting go: of tears, of tides, of shorelines. I take the brush and rush it, slow it, snake it along the page. “Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going,” Mary Oliver writes.
Standing, I watch the shorelines of Lake Michigan. I didn’t understand the vastness of it and the beauty of the water until I was there, immersed in sensing, hearing, feeling. I hear waves and waves, feeling confounded by the lake and its largeness, tracing my attention along the snaking shoreline. Met with the sunset, water’s iridescence stretches out across the horizon. Silver, lilac, and peach pink shine gold across the water, warmed and moving against the evening, as if each night takes ink, and rolls it slowly, and presses it into our memories, leaving an imprint. I watch as the waves continue. We glide by, coaxing out heat, watching the waves. Water is a mirror reflecting life and time and sky. I imagine the lake at its depths. I imagine jumping in.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn. Long stretches of highways and sunlight. Music and movement and motion. Night bike rides.
From a Past Season:
Remember the River
"By the water, I turn thoughts from brick and concrete, stiff and stuck, into soft swell of water. Watching the river, body becomes a conduit for the current of life. A wave in sync with experience. Rock and earth, canyons and mountains, moments of harshness, met with enough water and persistence, will shift around and change form. I sit with the water and ask it, how can I flow with this moment? I listen, it speaks. I wonder, and it listens. Gentle, it says. Torrent. Persistence."
Gathering the Drops
"Creating, sustaining, destroying, crafting canyons in our minds, carving our understanding out through the actions of our lives in the world. Word, breath, thought, shape, pattern, action, however small, amasses over into something of density and form. Which is to say that what we choose to focus on matters, and that our matter adds up. Miracle, particle, the thoughts we choose to sift though, and hold onto, and belief contribute to the shapes of our days, and how our lives form."
By the Water
"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. "