Swimming One Day in August

The plan: swim a total of 24 hours / 1440 minutes during the month of August. Not continuously, but collectively. The goal, suggested by RJP last August (2024), came first. Minutes later, I realized that it fit with Mary Oliver’s poem, “Swimming, One Day in August.” Last year I couldn’t complete it because of a closed lake and marathon training. This year, a closed lake almost thwarted it again, but I rallied and did it.

tag: 1 day of swimming

While I swam, I tried to practice the lines from Oliver: It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings. I also reflected on what those words/ideas/suggestion could mean.

Now is the time for the deepening and quieting of the spirit

  1. dredging the lake, making it deeper — turning it from a marsh and wetland to a recreational lake (4 aug)
  2. deepening of relationship to other humans, to water and its inhabitants (5 aug)
  3. deepening of understanding of the lake and how it’s managed (5 aug)
  4. deepening of the encounter with water as other as alien as not-I (6 aug)
  5. deepening of the encounter with water as the strange, imprecise, uncontained/unconstrained (19 aug)
  6. deepening of the encounter with water as other — not metaphor but simile (19 aug)
  7. deepening the obsession with water (19 aug)
  8. deepening my commitment with double swims (11 aug)
  9. deepening my commitment to keeping the lake clean and safe (14 aug)
  10. deepening my commitment through rootedness, a settling in (23 aug)
  11. quieting: growing easy, relaxed (13 aug)
  12. deeper in my life, deeper in my body (14 aug)
  13. quieting involves motion: the 10,000 adjustments of vivid action to balance/float, reach the staining of mind and time together, muscle memory — application of attention and automatic (15 aug)
  14. quieting involves motion: finding calm in the midst of constant motion, quiet/still enough (29 aug)
  15. quieting: swimming in the morning, in an empty lake (20 aug)
  16. quieting as stillness steadiness duration enduring durable (23 aug)
  17. quieting as stillness and getting to the core, stripping away layers, condensing (23 aug)
  18. quieting: stilling stillness death — people who have drowned in the lake (27 aug)
  19. time, as mentioned in Oliver’s poem and beyond: one day / time / now / mechanical / afternoon / tomorrow / again
  20. living differently in/with time — the mechanical part broken, where/when a day can mean many different things (16 aug)
  21. Endi Bogue Hartigan and different ways to describe/read time: eyelash o’clock, orchid o’clock (17 aug)
  22. the Apple watch: a watch? more than a watch? something other than a watch? what is tracked — data? how is time represented in data? (18 aug)
  23. the Apple watch — what does my watch watch? (20 aug)

As I thought about the Oliver poem, I also read Endi Bogue Hartigan’s oh orchid o’clock and revisited lines from Anne Carson and Alice Oswald. This was a great experiment that has produced many new ideas and led me back to devoting more attention to time. I’m thinking that something from this month will become the topic of September. But what? Not sure, yet (as of 4 sept).