In a conversation with Clare last night, she told me about a time in her life when she couldn’t walk past a body of water without wading into it. I know this feeling, the pull water has as an embodiment of vitality, a beacon of life, but also as the dark, still thing possessing secrets in its depths we long to know. We need water, are made of water, but how often when we’ve swam out past the waves and find ourselves bobbing and paddling through the sea does the urge to swim back to shore suddenly strike us?
There is something about water that speaks to a primordial desire. It is the desire to join something you cannot become no matter how wholly you immerse yourself in it.
How many times have I gathered friends together and drove to Nevada City to baptize myself in the crystalline waters of the Yuba River? When I see pictures of it, it makes me thirsty. I want to be naked in the sun on a boulder along the river’s shore.
My trip to Switzerland last week was as much a pilgrimage to dip my toes to the rivers and lakes as it could be for this time of the year when the waters are still as cold as the snow they came from. Every body of water I met, I stopped and slipped my sandals off.
30 Days to Berlin 