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.