A Meditation on Water and Related Poetry

When people ask what my ‘happy place’ is, I usually balk at the question. There is not just one kind of happiness, more than that we link to content. When I think of the times I’ve been at my best, it’s been more about people than the places we inhabit - friends, family, the characters I love. 

But when thinking of environments that make me happy, I think there is only one answer:

Water.

Be it fresh, salt, bath, sea - there is nothing guaranteed to relax me more than a dip in that good ol’ H2O. Maybe you feel the same. This is natural, I think. Water is the origin of all life - we are born of, in, around it. As infants we possess an uncanny ability to survive in its embrace, knowing to hold our breath before the ability to control most other body parts. Mammals naturally know how to move in water, to paddle their limbs and change their heart rate. Maybe there’s something in us - a genetic telephone wire link to the ancient first fish who was bitterly disappointed to find this note on the kitchen table from its child:

‘Fish-Mum, I’ve decided to go for a little waddle on earth’.

‘Ariel, listen to me;, wailed the fish from it's underwater kitchen window, 'the human world is a mess! Life under the sea is better than anything they’ve got up there’. (Sebastien, the little mermaid)

… Okay, maybe I’m reimagining history a little bit here

Entering water, we are environmentally disconnected from everyday life, brought into the present through wet contact with our nerve endings. It might be cold, or warm, or so hot it stings to touch. But the sensation reminds us we are alive.

Growing up overweight, the water provided respite. During my PE lessons at school, I was about as useless on land as that first fish would have been if it had been told to run cross-country. Memories of red-faced embarrassment, taste of metal and snot in my throat. Lithe classmates looking on in pity as I walked my wheezing way to the finish line - dead last, of course. Swimming class was the only time I could partake in sport and not be viewed as either an embarrassment or a target. Apart from the inevitable terror of changing-room nudity (cue me rushing like an Orc-feared hobbit into the toilet cubicles), swimming lessons allowed me to find joy in sport. Once in the water, I wasn’t clumsy, or lumbering, or even visibly unfit as the water hid red faces, prevented sweat patches. 

The water instilled discipline, too. Every Friday in my primary-school years I’d spend an hour swimming laps whilst being barked at by my teacher Roni - a supercell battery-pack of a woman - the perfect fusion of army sergeant and strict nan. Roni and her husband Mike were proudly the second-oldest couple to ever have run the London Marathon, and in her mind that meant that us students had no excuse to slack in the water.

Just like the double-caramel Magnum my Mum bought me after each lesson, the strength of character I gained through those painful Fridays was far sweeter than any temporary suffering in the pool. Now I am lucky to call myself a strong swimmer, with a good understanding of my own body, breath, and how important it is to be careful of the water. Growing up near the sea, I have many memories of being bashed about by waves in my wetsuit and sustaining cuts from indignant rocks. Here I learnt the power of water, and to respect the sea as a creature unknowable to one small as me. 

If you see a mushroom in a forest, you might recall how it is actually connected to every other fungus in a mycorrhizal network. Across a vast patch of earth one mushroom sends nutrients to another through underground avenues, telephone-cracklings of static in alien speak between the pair becoming group becoming whole. I get that same feeling in the water. Think of May 2020, Charlotte floating in wetsuit oblivion, staring out at a vast grey-blue speckled mass of sea and willing the waves to send messages across the globe to other lonely swimmers. Then, I felt a kind of kinetic magic I still can’t really explain. Something like the sea-people feel when bathing in a full moon. Or that first fish’s daughter when she bobbed two eyes above the surface and saw sky for the first time. A feeling of connection.

That’s why the water is my happy place, an almost different dimension where one is reminded of the whole, of the self. Of connection. 

Tomorrow I travel to Australia, and shall meet my partner’s friends and family for the first time. There I plan to swim in the Southern Hemisphere (keeping an eye out of course for the multitude of Australian creatures whose apparent sole design purpose is to kill me). Bobbing about in an ocean thousand of leagues away from the chilly grey mass I am used to, I look forward to sinking my head below the surface and entering that muffled space where my thoughts are free to skull. On Australian land, I shall forge new connections, and at sea I shall be reminded of how connected the world already is. It’s a bit wanky probably, but we all have flaws. So, as the big R-Romantic you know and occasionally scan the musings of, I present to you my water poetry for the month, this time inspired by my Happy Place/s. My memories of water.

I hope you enjoy the traced currents of my memories through reflections on beaches, brine, and the best of times. Until next month I send all my love, open palms like sea-stars,

Char x

The Bath at home.

Bergamot 

Bubbles

Lavender scrub

Plastic doll from the corner shop

Speckled scalp, brown gunk.

Hiding her from my mother until 

one day

She saw

And we had to cut open her head.

Inside spill of

Mould

Infested

Debris

‘It’s not the sort of thing you can just

Wash away’

Nit-comb scraped through

Embroidering toilet tissue

With insect-legs

Blood 

From my body

Given to you.

We buy new shampoo,

Mum mutters how it’s a waste.

Even clean hair won’t stop the spread.

Muscle relax

Clear aquamarine

Burn to the touch.

My father never smoked.

Not even one cigarette.

Now mint-green shower gel

Stings in a good way.

Purge the dirt

The germs

The thing that spreads unseen 

Crawling about in the brain and

On the scalp.

Shake it off like 

Dandruff 

Keeps coming back.

Until there’s

Not much

Of him

Left.

I’m  twelve years old,

Looking up at my reflection in the

Skylight above our bath.

Translucent against moody sapphire,

She floats away

Into the sky.

The day my period came, and I still decided to swim.

Edge

Of the bed

Womanhood.

Join of my pants

White to russet-brown.

Lilac dresser with the fairy handles.

It comes quietly 

Stretching a moment at the seams

Flowing

A stream in a river

In a sea.

Mum calls up

Reminds me to pack a towel.

Squeak of wetsuit-pull

Selkie skin

transformation.

Left for later.

Nature pulls me in waves -

Ruby constance.

Late-night cursing at cramps to come.

The stone I found on Brighton Beach

Peredur Found me first.

Looped on the end of a serpent’s tail 

Acid 

hard as rock.

‘I will have you’,

said he and lopped me from 

One snake

to another. 

I lay -

Was laid -

In one calloused hand.

Held with force that

gifted him wealth as much I weighed.

In fortune more gold than glister itself. 

Weathered storms and 

Acid-punctures 

Made smooth with beating - 

I fit like a fish-lip.

Dangling from his 

silver hook

hanging

my shiny self, I

made him a ring. 

Poisonous dart-frog he flashed colours:

Auburn, gold, yellow, black.

Through seven nights by morning.

Leap-frogging six of his brothers

to damn up himself as an Addanc. 

Inconstant as ice he 

could not find in me 

the shine that came in the hair of others. 

Seeing her, the moment he liked best

tore me away from sight.

Dashed down the rocks to

trip my hold 

over many a dangerous spike or 

pike-mouthed predator 

long and spiney 

in the brine

I lay a thousand years in time and made my way 

o’er lip of land and corn. 

Fell in a wave and thrown up on shore

in the lap of a beach I knew not

how to lie -

Nor could if i tried,

tongueless I spied:

Tangerine softness. 

Rose on the cream. 

Soft padded hands.

Worn down by the stream.

Encircling me.

She took me home, 

reverence rich with meaning she 

Knew who I was. 

And the word ‘hag’ 

Was said without malice. 

Like it was respect. 

Like it was loving.

Like it was love 

In water and air 

Wild and tame and salt-crusted -

She makes me like velvet.

 I am hard sometimes. 

Rough and dull to her softness, knowing

not how to be sand 

when my life has been blighted by those who would grind me down. 

Peredur found me first,

Looped on the end of a serpent’s tail.

Acid

I was thrown up into 

a soft place.

Land of charcoal,

syrup,

and milk

Sitting with you on a rock in the sea

Covid

Lonely

Pacific

Atlantic 

Sitting here with you

Is the closest we’ve ever been.

So I see

It

You

Sea so wide

Salt becomes brine

We connect

Canned and caught in our tin.

Love is more than lines.

But I bite, knowing you are on the other end.

Enoshima

Clap.

Clap.

Bow

Blessing of Dragon’s breath

On salt licked pilgrims.

Those who go for faith,

Candle-light 

Paper veins 

Three-pronged philosophies

Of Earthly gods.

Those who go for love

Write my name upon

A padlock seal

And leave it by the bell

One day seas will turn red

And death shall overcome us

Melting all but metal on the hill.

Those who go for leisure

Likening dragonfly wings to pixels

On GameBoy advance

‘Look at all those yanma’,

He proclaims, dipping his feet in 

Rockpool memories of 

Seafoam Island.

I go like waves

Ninety minute Tokyo train

Leads to lapping

Rest my gaze on horizon

A long gray line

That curls in animate

Lets me ride on his back.

Enoshima Island

Goes with memories

With faith, with love, with leisure,

With a roar, dragon carries

A cloud goddess home.

Onsen Haiku

Anxiety wash

Bubbles over sulphur - splash!

Serenely submerged

.