Living on water
Creative Strategies #4: Live on the water. We belong here.
Everywhere you have ever stood was once under water.
Very likely, where you are sitting right now, millions of years ago you could look up and see the sky filled with a fleet of flying giants.
We are the ancestors of those strange amphibians who first ventured up into the strange lands of light and green and sun.
“We come from the sea!” says a swimmer in Esther Williams swimming pool in my first novel, Door Number Three. We do indeed.
Why are the memories of pools and oceans so warm, so vivid?
The merging of both of our selves: the water and the air.
Water is promise of escape and cleansing. Renewal and safety.
To be buoyant is to be once again in our original state.
Gravity could not touch us in our mothers’ womb.
Old bones and old souls especially enjoy the zero-gravity vacation
their arthritic bodies are given by a pool.
To feel the weightless world we once knew.
The freedom of the young who love to fling themselves at life,
crash land and come out laughing
(like The Beatles in the opening shot of Hard Days Night).
We are drawn to water as we are drawn to fire.
It takes us to the edges of things
by offering to warm or slate.
Water promises horizons.
And just now I realize that I have spent hours after hours
alongside rivers. My dad was a fisherman. I was not.
I might have been 10 when I began to take pictures of rivers
as my dad and his brothers were fishing.
I began to see how beautiful they were.
How could obeying natural laws be so beautiful?
All the water has ever done is to seek the easiest path to the lowest point.
“Meet Me On The River of Time,” Van Morrison sings.
Rivers taught me a new appreciation of time.
Sit beside a river long enough and the pace of the flow gets in you,
you begin to feel what it is to live at the speed of water.
The constantly replenishing, the continually changing sameness,
the flow of the current, the adaptability of its path,
the least amount of energy to convey the laws of nature to their natural resting place.
To experience time on a river is to know how hurried everything else is.
The creatures who creep along the bottom, or scoot from shore to shore,
the tiny school of fish with almost transparent bodies,
the ducks, and cranes and busy squirrels, the cats who leap gracefully across.
Everything around the stream scampers and scoots and flies and soars,
but the stream never hurries.
It flows.
The stream proceeds at its own pace.
It’s currents revealed by the free spinning leaves as they make their last voyage.
The past travels the stream as well. You never know what the river will bring you.
A lover? A ring? A brick? A song.
Here’s a early mix of a song producer/drummer Doug Austin & I made in 2014. The movie was the view out our back window in Troy, Mich.
Patrick O’Leary’s new novel “51”comes out in feb ’2022 from Tachyon.
