I See Myself Home

I've returned home from August, and from the resolve that emerged as I went into this gift of a month that I'd swim outdoors each day. It wasn't a rule so much as a blessing I've given myself, and that was given to me by spending most of the time on P's farm in Sweden, a few hundred metres from a beautiful lake.

Something about taking this love of mine - for water - sacredly has been part of a cleansing that I've felt on my skin and within my body. 

The resolve has also been a means for creativity as I've travelled towards home, and for solving how to take this water with me into my homelife via a couple of days in Oslo. I've managed it like this: yesterday - in the open air pool on the edge of Shrewsbury; on Friday - in a barrel of sea water as part of a sauna in Oslo; on Thursday - from a beach on the island of Hovedøya reached by boat from Aker Brygge, Oslo; on Wednesday - first thing in little Norrsjön before I left P's farm for the station. Swimming has given these last few days a shape that has made the leaving of August purposeful amid the undercurrent of sadness that comes with endings.

This morning, I swam out of August's final day in the River Severn just along from where I live. It was J. who helped me to see I could find my way home like this. We met early, and she brought a flask of tea for afterwards. All these years in Shrewsbury, and I've never swum in the river which characterises the town's year with its floods and lows, its duck families, weir, its leaping salmon. Without the peaty clean clarity of Norrsjön it has its own beauty in trees, swans, and tiny fishes.

And on my allotment, I've started a new project: Biscuit Tin Lake. I won't be able to swim in it until I work out how to shrink down to Lilliputian height. But I've sunk the tin into soil, filled it with water, surrounded it with stones, shells, and rose and raspberry prunings. I've floated a few flowers on its surface in memory of friends and family. And maybe, in September, there'll be birds that come to drink, and to bathe. 

I Dip Into The City

I left London when I was 24, so I'm used to cities by now. Nearly. In contrast to London, Sweden's capital, Stockholm, is home to between 1 and 2 million people, depending on where the line is drawn. The city's structure is watery, and forests live between, and close to, even the most densely settled areas. 

Last week, I took a trip away from the farm on which I'm writing and being with P. We travelled together to Karlingesund Retreat Centre where we first met in February's Grief Ritual. We spent three days in the beauty of trees, rocks, water, and swam with stars (I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars). Then, when P. dropped me off at Karlstad station and drove home, I travelled on to Stockholm to spend time with my longest-serving Swedish friends.

The extraordinary thing about Stockholm is that so much of it is clean. On our first day together, C. and I took a bus, our walking shoes, swimming costumes, and sandwiches out to Bogesundslandets Nature Reserve  We walked along well-marked forest tracks, often by the shore. The sky was blue between the aspens, alders, birches, and pines, fluffed up by a scattering of white summer clouds. We talked as women who've known each other in visits which seem to me now, from the perspective of 45 of years friendship, like a chain of islands interspersed with stretches of water, some like small seas, some like rivers. Each of our island meetings over this span has felt solid under my feet.

Keeping to my one-outside-swim-a-day in August commitment - a commitment I made to the inner child in me that has always loved to be in water and which has been too often in distress this past year - keeping this commitment came naturally last Monday. After a couple of hours' walking, we looked for a way in to the water, then changed on the smooth surface of a huge rock. The shore-side was a little rough on our soft feet and we braved it, recalling those summers of childhood when, having gone mainly barefooted - C. in Sweden, me in England - our feet had hardened satisfactorily by August. 

As part of the Baltic, the sea round Stockholm has low salinity: around 1/4 or 1/5 of the saltiness of the open ocean. I like this: the way a low-salt sea swim leaves my skin clean and smooth. I paddled around in the wake-spill of boats which were to-ing and fro-ing between islands, safely distant, sending their waves to shore. 

After our swim, we ate sandwiches, then walked to Vaxholm, via a café, via an ice cream shop, and the comforts of coffee and blackcurrant gelato. 

The next day, back in the city centre, I walked to a nearby park. At the public swim spot was a crowd of students enjoying their first days back at university. The jetty was crowded, and the water bobbed with rafts and barrels as students raced and cheered each other on. I waited till they'd gone singing up the path, then changed and swam. A boat, moored at the jetty, wafted weed-smoke into the air. People strolled past. I felt aware of my phone sitting in my jacket with my pile of clothes on the side. But I felt safe. Later, C. and S. took me to a rooftop bar - we drank sangria, and watched the sun set into the arms of the city.

And then next day, we drove to the island where I spent much of that first summer visit in 1982. The Stockholm Archipelago and its beauty has stayed with me ever since, captured in a few photographs I still have at home. I don't remember swimming then - though I remember sailing and loving it. I'd learned to hold my body back behind clothes, to hide my embarrassments from the elements. I'd learned a resistance to wearing - even to owning - shorts. On the bluest days, when C's mother kindly laid a selection of shorts out on my bed for me to borrow, I resisted even trying them on. 

I am glad I've made it to this point in life: the point where I've learned that to wear shorts on warm days is to feel the air as kindness, and to feel gratitude to my legs for all the walking and swimming. I've learned, since trying it first in Australia, that to swim naked is to be held by water, skin-to-skin. In the quiet of late summer weekdays, and in this quiet and chosen month of my own late summer, I have swum in places in and close to the city which are so free, so solitary, and so beautiful, that I wanted to share them with you.

I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

I will not forget last night’s swim until I forget everything. I went, with L&P, down to the harbour 1/2 a mile from where I’ve been staying these past three days, nestled on Sweden’s west coast. L had urged me to experience swimming in the dark.

There’s a jetty there, and a swimming ladder - Sweden thinks all the time of getting in and out of her waters. There’s a bench on the jetty to leave clothes, sit down to take shoes off, put them back on. 

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off - no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky - stars. I looked into the water - stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater - plankton when ruffled - in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty - we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night - British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

I Make It Through To The Big Lake

I may be testing your patience, dear readers, but my daily swim in Little Norrsjön has become the pivotal moment of my days in Sweden, so here's more swimming writing.

For the sake of geography, I should say that Little Norrsjön is attached to Norrsjön (sjö - lake) where the river feeds in. If you imagine the attachment as a T-shape, the river is the long stem. It branches into a right and a left arm, the right arm feeding Little Norrsjön and the left arm feeding Norrsjön. In other words, it's possible to reach Norrsjön from Little Norrsjön by swimming into and through the arms of the river. 

I've been approaching the river's arms for a while, swimming up to the meeting point, seeing the eddying currents, and backing out again. The forces have just looked too strong for me. Getting to Norrsjön looked simple enough, but getting out against the flow of the river? This has seemed much less certain. 

The other day, P. took me on a walk through the forest along the river. We saw so many trees felled by beavers I was surprised the beavers had any time to rest from gnawing activity. It's an extraordinary sight - teeth marks going through to the central fibres of a tree trunk: the ones that eventually give up the attempt to remain vertical and allow the tree to fall. 

The outcome of our walk through undergrowth, on the most densely padded forest floor my feet could remember (moss, decades of needle and leaf fall, berry bushes) was to see the T of the river from land. Seeing it from this viewpoint gave us the idea that, if the current proved too strong for me, I could get out of Norrsjön and walk to Little Norrsjön, with some danger of scratching and insect bites, but nothing more serious.

So the day before yesterday, I swam through.

Emerging into Norrsjön felt like possibility: like entering a wider, more expansive world. I've known it was there all along, seen it from the shore, but to approach it from the river's arms intensified the experience of opening out. I paddled around a little, noted the houses on the far shore, and a potential future adventure. But I wanted to save my energy for the swim back, which was a useful thought as I had to struggle against the current in some places. The branches and grasses on the banks lent me a hand, and I pulled myself back to the centre and the turning current, and then went with the flow into the growing familiarity of the smaller lake. 

There's something about this short journey, lake to lake, that lends itself to meaning, and I've been mulling it over for the last couple of days, but I'll leave you to make your own way through, dear readers.

P. pointed out this isn't beaver-work but the photo below is ... 

Ant work

The softest moss-floor

I Explore by Swimming

I’m reading ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ by Annie Dillard. She has an extraordinary perspective which includes some direct observations about living, including: “We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place.” For her, it’s not about the spectacular, but about seeing “what is there” (p.74).

I’ve found I can see what is there in lake little Norrsjön by swimming. I don’t know about you, but I was taught to swim in straight lines. While I’ve since splashed out into lakes and seas, it’s never struck me before that swimming can be a form of exploration: slow motion, but motion nonetheless. I had this realisation during my second swim, when I went a little further than the first, finding a sandbank and river-mouth. 

On the third swim I found the route via the river, which feeds both lakes, to the larger lake, but the strong current deterred me from making the full journey. Perhaps if the water levels, high after recent record rainfall, drop, then I’ll go further. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll strike out in a different direction altogether. 

I Land in Sweden

I took care, when I waded into the lake this morning along the side of the rowing boat, to note where I’d got in. It’s skirted with pines and I could imagine the boat becoming hidden the further I swam out, and mistaking one clump of trees for another, or one of the scattered houses, painted the burnt red colour which is traditional in Sweden, for its neighbour.

I was swimming the lake, little Nörrsjon, for the first time. My way in through reeds and water lilies was easy. Soon I was breast stroking, my gaze level with the water boatmen skirting across the tensing surface.

I felt safe and held - the water clear and regulated to a perfect temperature by the recent heat, my swimming confidence sufficient, the weather calm. 

When I reached the other shore’s lily pads, and at the moment of my turnaround, the water surface began to pit and ripple. It was rain, and each droplet was defined by its landing. It was rain in close up, and I began to see each drop as an entity. One landed on my nose as if providing evidence of a wetness additional to the lake’s.

I thought of the paperback I’d left out with my clothes and sped up my strokes, soon arriving back among lilies. As I approached the green pads, I noticed a strand of bubbles: a watery contrail delineating my earlier route through their rooty webs.

It surprised me that the traces of my way into the water had survived what was a thirty-or-so minute swim. Although I didn’t need the way marks, I retraced the line back to the water’s edge and my stuff. 

I’ve not always been able to trust my literal or metaphorical sense of direction, and so this happening - the persistence of the pathway I'd created underlining my trajectory - affirmed to me that I've arrived in a place that's intended.