Anima

“I want.”

The beginning of a petition. People ask things of water. A penny for luck. Good fortune, blessing. That’s not what I wanted, though.

A dialogue had started.

I come here for another time, another place. What draws me here pushed me forward. My presence was the question, in a way.

Summoning from the deep, pipeless: “Something more.”

The wind was coming across the water, rousing little waves of activity. It always seemed to be coming across the little clearing the lake made. The sun was coming down sharply even in late October, warming my skin and I could feel the bronzing. Evolution at work, always change, never status quo.

The warm wooden pier was solid under me, a still point in the world. I was in my element, the elements happening. Air, fire, water, earth. I took off my shoes and socks to feel it all.

“Maybe understanding.” Was that what I wanted?  

Women and water, that confluence of archetypes had been significant for me since college. The twenty-year old me talked about it sometimes with my friend Mary over tuna sandwiches. She was older, a mom of two, a freethinker. She probably said something knowledgeable, but all I remember was her show of dramatic interest, creating the tide I needed to venture further out.

At that point, I only understood that what drew me was my own unexplored depths – speaking to me in those postcards I collected from art museum gift shops, surfacing in dreams from time to time: a woman sitting at the water’s edge (or sometimes at the endpoint of an endless train track) bent over before the expanse, only her long hair shielding her from what was before her. Otherwise, she’s undefended. She’s not at a destination but at the starting place of some expedition unfurling before her.

Now here I was, in my favorite spot. A woman before the expanse seeking herself.

“Freedom.” That’s the question I asked of the formless deep – the stuff predating form.

Also coming to mind: other women with water. Ophelia. The Lady of Shallot. Virginia Woolf. The White Rock “Lady of the Lake,” who met her untimely death somewhere around here and is said to still haunt this place. Things had not turned out well for them. But that’s not what I was summoning. Not that kind of freedom. It was more Miranda-like. What will crash ashore? Or Birth of Venus. Monet’s Waterlilies. Advent of splendor, of exquisite serenity, a jailbreak from tedium. Lately things had otherwise settled, nothing appeared to be disturbing the surface. Was I free to interrupt? I needed a Great Wave of Kanagawa.

I reached into the water to make some splash, the watery abyss of my half-formed, unspoken mind-petition not prayer enough. And then it happened. Some small but real connection with all other wave riders. Everyone who ever plowed the surf and found the thrill of life’s beauty whipping their form. Everyone who ever thirsted for more, or for less. Who sought. We are all out here in the riptide, was the answer that the blue served up.

There’s more freedom than we can handle. The question is how wide we can open, fathoming its dimension. Whether we have the nerve to slip into that amorphous.