4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
77 degrees
wind: 11 mph, 21 mph gusts
Choppy today. Lots of swells and breathing on my right side. Sun, haze, sparkling water. I might have seen a few sparkle friends underwater, but no seagulls or fish. At least one swan boat and one paddle boarder. No algae or prickly vines. The water was a pale green with a hint of blue. Mostly opaque, although I could see my hands and the beautiful bubbles they shed. The sky was a pale blue with a few clouds.
The swim was hard. My back was sore from having to stretch higher to sight buoys and other swimmers hidden behind waves. I grew tired from battling the swells. I loved it — what a great workout! For short stretches, I got into a steady rhythm and felt Mary Oliver’s deepening and quieting of the spirit. I didn’t stop thinking. I didn’t feel like I was outside of myself. I felt relaxed and emptied, suspended in water, moving up and down, side to side. Not worried, just shoulders and calves and triceps and lungs rotating and kicking and flexing and breathing.
wave/swell pattern: Side to side rocking heading east from the big beach to the first buoy, the current pushing me a little to the north. Choppy, but no water crashing into or over me. Somewhere between the last orange buoy and the first green one, rough. Mostly breathed to my right. The buoy and other swimmers were lost in the waves. Draining. This is where my back would start to ache. The most challenging spot was rounding the green buoy closest to the big beach. Big waves wanting to push me under the buoy. It took 4 tries, but on the last loop I angled my boat-body right to avoid this pushing. Heading north, parallel to the big beach, the water rippled behind and over me. Mostly giving me a boost, sometimes sucking the energy out from under me. As I swam this last stretch, I wondered if I could learn to ride the waves or angle in ways that avoided the roughest contact.
image: I love the almost/half/barely-view of the first orange buoy after rounding the green buoy. I think I’ve written this before, but it reminds me of the faintest trace of the moon in the afternoon sky. Sometimes a faint orange, sometimes only the silhouette of something that makes the Sara in the back of my head whisper, moon.
This might be the image of the summer. Maybe I could put it in a poem with the image of the moon on water that I used to see in the dark basement window, made by a lightbulb, as I ran on the treadmill? Yes!
I’m continuing to revisit AO’s Dart. we change ourselves into the fish dimension. The fish dimension? I love it! Sounds like a great title for a poem.
excerpt from Dart/ Alice Oswald
He dives, he shuts himself in a deep, soft-bottomed
silence,
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts
I feel the silence under the water, but I also feel it above. A few times during my swim today, I stopped stroking and tread water, my head out in the air. Quiet. Only a few soft slaps of the water by other swimmers’ hands and feet.
nacreous = iridescent/iridescence = “a lustrous rainbowlike play of color caused by differential refraction of light waves (as from an oil slick, soap bubble, or fish scales) that tends to change as the angle of view changes (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
Last week, the water had streaks of red — or maybe tangerine? — in it. Today, blue-green. Not iridescent below, maybe above?
I love describing stroking through the water as lifting and shutting the lid! Also, the sky jumping in and out the world he loafs in. So good! I want to play with these images!
A different take on the far off orange glow: a buoy, or the idea of a buoy, or the certainty that a buoy, orange and glowing, is there.