field notes:

10.12.2002

I've been swimming since I was a toddler: certified by the Crystal Scarborough school in L.A. when I was 2 years old. As kids, we always had swimming pools and afternooons spent there remember like blissful suburban days. Our house was the only one on the block with a pool and we were popular, kids tan and competent sliced through the blue water and the air with shouts. We swam not like fish but like beavers: in the pool we constructed complicated worlds of play and enterprise. The diving board could be the store, the stairs a castle, the ladder a pathway into the other world, and the drain buried treasure. We competed with each other, my brother and I: who could swim underwater the most laps, who could hold their breath longer. At times, we also held each other underwater in anger, but we survived that like we survived the other slings and arrows of childhood which lurked always just outside the pool's perimeter.

Later there were swim teams: mindless hours daily spent in the back and forth of the too-warm chlorinated pools. Swim meets with the Downey Dolphins, striped speedos and terrycloth robes and the promise ribbons. Summers at the beach we learned the salty side of water, the up-down scary joy of getting tossed by a too-tough wave; the fun that could be had on a borrowed raft; the delightful taste of salt licked off one's own sun-dried arm.

I try to swim every day now in Tomales Bay. It is both practice and compulsion. Even on days when I think it's too cold to swim, the water calls me. I love the October water. It's cooler, but still and glassy and often I am the only cause of ripples. I love the bubble that wells in front of me as my hands rise up together in swimful prayer and then part to the side as I glide forward, embraced by still more water. I swim in the reflection of the blue and white sky, and the water is cool and fresh, and my body is still strong and healthy, and it is more than enough.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:32 PM link | comments []

10.9.2002

Metamorphosis

From the Greek meta for after; metamorphoun to transform.

The oakmoths have begun to emerge from their pupation stage. They are called a night-flying moth in the literature, but the delicate moths fill the days' sky as well. Especially in the afternoon light, they are quite beautiful and enamoring. They flutter around the trunks of the defoilated oaks, around the woodpile, their gossamer wings reflecting and filtering the sunlight in small, miraculous ways.

In its larval stage it has a bulbous head and invades my home (see posts 9/17 -9/23). I only see a live worm about once a day now. Mostly the little buggers have pupated. The sides of my house are covered in the mystic bundles. They are whitish with dark markings resembling a scarab beetle. The moths must be emerging from the first of the worms to have pupated. I don't know how long they will be with us before they lay their eggs and finally die.

How incredible to have these radically distinct stages within one life. They go through two generations in one year, and if we were to have a warm, dry winter, they might possibly have a third. Each stage so singular and focused. This one climbs and eats oak leaves, then finds a suitable spot to pupate; that one flutters around a bit, then lays eggs on or near those same oak trees -- all so the pattern can repeat again and again with varying intensity from year to year.

I try to compare these metamorphoses with the stages of my life. It is more difficult to say what the purpose of these human changes are. Meaning is discernable only from a distance, and changes with perspective as well as with time. Were the days I spent in the confines of a stuck relationship a pupation period? Am I fluttering to dry my new wings in the northern california sun here now? It feels that way, but it's hard to know for sure.

Even if I have sprouted wings now, that is not the final word. This ain't no child's fairy tale with one happy ending. It's a real human story, with stops and starts, realizations and darkness, happy kingdoms and dungeon trapdoors, worms and wings.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:21 AM link | comments []

10.7.2002

I'll be back tomorrow with more stories from life at the shore...meanwhile a poem from the greatest american poet:

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden: and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford
Stories That Could Be True

posted by Lisa Thompson on 10:54 PM link | comments []