Love Bites: Water Seeking

Last year, immersed in uncertainties in my life, I felt a pull to any bodies of water I could find. All I knew was that I wanted to be by lakes, seas, oceans, and so, I planned trips seeking these out wherever I could find them. Day to day my mind is pulled into a hundred different streams: obligations, tasks, random thoughts, hopes, worries, memories. Water felt like a potential antidote. It wasn’t so much that I was seeking escape as it was that I wanted to experience something bigger than myself. Maybe it was a combination of the two.

Bodies of water have long been imbued with significance. Drawing from neuroscience and anecdote, marine biologist Wallace J Nichols coined the term 'Blue Mind' to refer to the meditative state your mind enters when in proximity to water. I’ve definitely experienced this sense of near instinctual peace near water.  Around the world, water embodies a multiplicity of spiritual depths and meanings: from water deities and sacred waters, to holy water and ritual purification. It both sustains life and is life itself, irreducible to mere commodity.

Fear when faced with the vast unknown of the ocean is common. The unknown scares me too, but what scares me more is the preclusion of possibility. While drinking in still, clear waters, my anxieties didn’t wash away as I had initially hoped. But instead, I sat with the feeling, and that was enough.

I returned to early summer in Glasgow, the boundary of each day dissipating into a cool, clear night. Slowly re-entering the routines of everyday life after a period away, I hoped to stretch out the afterglow of clarity I felt for as long as possible. Watching the last light of the dying day dance across the rippling surface of the river, moving onwards, I felt fully present, immersed in the moment.