I was planning to do the first Cedar Lake open swim of the season. Scott and I drove all the way over there (the other side of town, 30 minutes in traffic), but when I got out of the car: thunder. Then more thunder, then rain, then some small hail. I waited 15 more minutes: thunder. I know the rules. When lifeguards hear thunder or see lightening they must close the lake and they can’t reopen it for 30 minutes. We decided to not wait. As we drove away it cleared up. Sun. Open swim probably started after 6. Bummer. I’m still glad we didn’t stay. Waiting another 30 minutes in the car for the lake to reopen would have seemed like a long time.
from earlier in the day
1
In yesterday’s entry — the part of it that I wrote this morning — I described my bubble friends as orbs. I like this connection to my recent study of spiders and one type of web they weave. A reoccurring theme for summer swimming: looping, orbiting, water orbs?
2
To consider before a swim: what does it mean to be thought through by water?
Alice Oswald: It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking–that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think.
from 3 feb 2026 log entry
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Reading past entries tagged “Alice Oswald,” I found this:
I’m more and more wary of the kind of willed and conscious act of writing. More and more I leave my mind to do it by itself. So I will, you know, go out and be kind of shocked by all the colours and pictures and smells and then purposefully not think of them linguistically. I think that the underneath mind will then do the work and that’s the mind I’m interested in. So the skill for me is then learning how to raid that underneath mind and then, when you do pick up a pen, you’re listening just hard enough so that you don’t use your surface mind. You get down to the mind that has taken everything in.The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself
Instead of the underneath mind, the underwater mind, or the just beneath the surface mind? The water-logged mind?
Yes! The water-logged mind. For years now, I’ve wanted to create something that combines log entries and poems and lists (and more) and brief descriptions of using swimming to teach myself to see differently. The tentative title and theme: water logged, which is not to be confused with the wonderful travel/wild swimming/nature book by Roger Deakin, Waterlog. Perhaps the way to approach this book is not to see it as something that I could submit and get published, but as a useful archive and a fun experiment in making — a glossary of words, terms, ideas + a place for gathering a range of ideas about swimming and water. A way to do something more with what I’ve already gathered.
4
autonomic = acting or occurring involuntarily / refers to autonomic nervous system: “a component of the peripheral nervous system, regulates involuntary physiologic processes, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. The ANS consists of 3 anatomically distinct divisions: sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric.”
from Anne Carson’s “1=1”:
And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic.
1=1 / Anne Carson
5
Remembering the rope I wrote about in my 10 Things yesterday — the one that tethers the buoy to the lake bottom that I can see as I swim over it. An anchor of some sort is attached to it, then dropped by a lifeguard in a kayak. This line, this anchor, only a temporary tether, removed at the end of open swim. There are fixed buoys at the lake, too: cylindrical, white ones (4 at the big beach, 3 at the little beach) and reddish orangish pinkish ones, faded from years of sun and water (how many of these? I’ve never counted; perhaps I should sometime soon?). I’ve never really studied them underwater, but I imagine there are ropes that extend down to permanent anchors in the lake floor. The white and red/orange/pink buoys are in the same place every year and stay there from sometime in May to sometime in September — there doesn’t seem to be a fixed date when they are reinstalled or deinstalled each year.
Was it last year that I wrote/thought about the geometry of the lake? Yes — 5 august 2025.
from Swimming Chenango Lake/ Charles Tomlinson
There is a geometry of water, for this
Squares off the clouds’ redundancies
And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere
All angles and elongations: every tree
Appears a cypress as it stretches there
And every bush that shows the season,
A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not
A fantasia of distorting forms, but each
Liquid variation answerable to the theme
It makes away from, plays before:
It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.
geometry: the shape and relative arrangement of the parts of something / relationship of points, lines, surfaces, angles
geometry and not
distorting form — angles and points and lines off due to water and unreliable vision
And now I’m thinking about the geometric ways in which I approach swimming in the lake:
- angles
- trajectories
- following a line, working to understand that relationship between points and surfaces (swimmers’ hands piercing the water and plotting my course with glitter)
- lines and angles (wider angles to achieve distance from other swimmers, to find the buoy without seeing it)
- lines and surfaces (try to follow a line that cuts across a wave/swelled surface instead of directly into it)
- the line of the rope tethered to the buoy and a weight, anchoring the buoy
- the angle of that rope line
- how the angle of the sun and the angle of the buoy determine how likely I am to see it and how much orange is reflected on the surface of the water
- the angle of the lifeguards in relation to the angle of my projected path, how the difference between these angles affects how straight I swim
- same with the angle of other swimmers’ paths
- the sharp angles of prickly vines
- parallel lines: water and airplane, kicking feet, body and bottom, body and big beach
- perpendicular lines: water and light pole
- buoys as balls, spheres, orbs
- buoys as cylinders
- buoys as equilateral triangles
- angles of elbow, the arc of an elbow’s path from out of the water to back in
- grid quadrants: 1. from big beach to little beach, 2. from little beach to middle green buoy, 3. from middle green to final green buoy, 4. from final green buoy to first orange buoy
- rounding the buoy vs. cutting a sharp angle
- coordinate points: hand/water, a swimmer/another swimmer’s toe, orange buoy/surface
I’d like to think more about the relationship between points — plotted through sparkle and hands piercing water / as different entities (object/subject) on a plane (surface of the water). Anne Carson discusses the anthropology of water (need to revisit this), what is the geometry of water (to me)?
Another thought: coordinates. I recall a line I “found” in a New Yorker essay about when the forms are too fuzzy, I escape into coordinates (see 26 may 2026).