Calling all swimmers

Delighting in the dip

I’m excited to invite you — and anyone else who you think might be interested — to participate in an art project about swimming. I’ll explain that at the end! First, some background.

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I have always been a swimmer. My best childhood friend Josie used to tease me that my “move” when I liked a boy was to take him swimming. She was right. It’s still my only move — but it isn’t an invitation reserved only for romantic interests. I have spent many an afternoon jumping off rocks or wading into rivers and reservoirs and oceans with people I am curious about. Swimming with someone is a good way to get to know them, to seek kinship. We swimmers recognize each other.

Every element — earth, fire, air, water — has been deemed holy at some point, by some religion or poet or another, and rightfully so. But perhaps none is so deified as water. The metaphors abound. How it envelops you, cradles you, buoyant. How it purifies, cleanses. How it holds no shape and every shape, always taking the form of its container. How, to paraphrase Rumi, the drop isn’t just in the sea, the whole sea is in the drop.

I often think of all this while I swim. Just as often, I find myself thinking of nothing at all.

Gaga floating in the Aegean Sea in 2017 (photo by my cousin Homer Parkes)

Almost exactly three years ago, my life as I knew it fell apart and I fled my short-lived home in the high desert of New Mexico. Heartbroken, severely depressed, and newly unemployed, I moved in with my grandmother in her house on the beach in New York, under the convenient guise of “taking care of her,” when in reality I needed the care just as much.

Gaga didn’t understand my sadness. She didn’t ask or pry, when I emerged from my room puffy eyed. But she also must have known that she was helping me in the best way she could without needing to say much at all. It was nice to just be loved and not have to explain myself. She was giving me a safe place to be, and a simple job to do.

The most important of these jobs was taking Gaga for morning swims. We had a choreographed routine. I can see it perfectly: she’s wearing a one-piece suit in pink or red or navy, a wide-brimmed nylon sunhat, and big wraparound sunglasses. She walks onto the porch and calls out: lifeguard? The sight of her through the window with her chicken legs and her little belly and her eagerness pulls me upright. I pull on a suit and sprint to catch up. Sometimes we have company, cousins or aunts or visiting friends. Sometimes it’s just us. She kicks off her espadrilles at the edge of the dune and walks, steadily but slowly, across the sand. She squints at the sea but can’t see much, so she asks, is that granny ocean? When I confirm, she pulls off her shades and pops out her hearing aids and nestles them into her hat, and then she charges toward the water. I run in after her, and we dunk, and bob, and hoot from the cold. She mentions how in the water her shoulders don’t hurt so much. We float together for a while, looking out at the horizon, feeling tiny and vast at the same time. When Gaga says she’s finished I contemplate the waves until there’s a lull, and we side-step onto the shore, holding hands. Thank you, baby, she says. We walk back up to the house, I make coffee, and the day begins.

So much of my life has been consumed by wondering if I’m spending my time right, whether what I’m doing has any worth, what my “purpose” is supposed to be. I have often felt like I’m behind — I should be more successful by now, more experienced, more extraordinary. Caring for my grandmother for those months was perhaps the first time those questions weren’t echoing in my mind. I was there, and that was enough.

I knew I loved being my grandmother’s “lifeguard”; I knew our swims were special. But I didn’t know they were tiny pilgrimages, daily devotional practices, until later, at the end of the summer when the trapdoor opened and my life changed entirely.

The twentieth century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote, of her habitual repetition of George Herbert’s poem “Love III” that incited her first mystical experience, that she “used to think [she] was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without [her] knowing it the recitation had the virtue of prayer.” It seems to me that I often pray without knowing it. If prayer, as Simone Weil would say, is simply attention, then I prayed by my grandmother’s side for twenty-eight years without realizing what I was doing.

Some people I know feel compelled to cross themselves when they pass a church — it’s habit, or respect, or insurance. Gaga died the winter after our summer together, but I feel her with me all the time, especially when water comes into view and I can’t help myself but begin to disrobe and walk toward it, moth to flame.

Eighty-eight year old Gaga at Georgica Beach in July 2020

One of the questions I find myself asking again and again is: how do I pay better attention to the things that are holy to me? After Gaga died, I started filming my swims. The videos are simple and uniform: I didn’t care whether they were boring or repetitive. I didn’t want them to feel like a performance. I did my best to forget that anyone might ever watch them. I just wanted to make a container around my practice, to turn my attention to this habit that, with some intention, felt deeply sacred.

I toted my camera to Mexico and Southern California and Massachusetts and New York. I usually swam alone, sometimes with a friend. Greta was almost always there, sitting dutifully on the beach or sniffing around the sand. Strangers crossed my path and sometimes swam alongside, fellow churchgoers.

So far I have two hours of video, some of which I showed last spring as part of my “open house” thesis presentation at the end of my master’s program.

Now, I want to expand this project. This is where you come in! I’m looking for fellow swimmers. Maybe you'd call it a spiritual practice, or maybe you'd just say you love it. It's a ritual, it makes you feel alive, you enjoy the peace, or the physical challenge, or the feeling of smallness against the vast sea.

If this sounds like you, and you’d be willing to let me film one of your swims, let me know by responding to this email or filling out this form. You can swim alone or in a group, whatever you want, as long as it’s in a natural body of water. And please feel free to share this with anyone who you think might be interested — I would love to include people who I don’t already know. Don’t worry about where you are or whether it’s too far away. I hope to be doing this project for a long time, and I find myself in all kinds of places. I'll come to you, you just have to take the plunge.