Fall Swimming



End of summer swimming is the most precious kind of swimming for me.  Because of the way it feels.  Because my last swim of the season is approaching.

The lake is colder now, the air chilled, the sun lower in the sky each evening when I swim. Visits to this lake are no longer about relaxing at the beach, watching the children play, cooling off on long swims out to the middle of the lake. My attending more of a pilgrimage, an ablution, ritual preparation for the upcoming season of darkness. 

It is harder to get into the water.  I am all goosebumps and shivers until I commit to the cold, welcome the chill into my body. Oh my! The cold overtakes me in those first glides and pulls until the movement warms me from the inside out. The water is silkier and thicker this time of year flowing over my skin like a robe, enveloping me in soft embrace. After, I am infused with vibrancy and aliveness.  All that cold so hard at first makes me feel so alive after.  It is this feeling I will miss most of all, the penetrating awake relaxation after the cold swim. Each evening swim is so precious to me now because it takes more and the last one approaches.

Something about this season of swimming instructs me in the art of agape love.  Unlike the more self-focused, self-grasping romantic and erotic love that seeks mainly for oneself pleasure, acceptance, safety, the self-emptying and giving nature of agape is more about surrendering to what love asks from us, holding the tenderness of both joy and sorrow.  There is in the emptying the chance to be filled by something that is given to us beyond what we might grasp, take, create for ourselves. We receive something greater than ourselves in the giving of agape love.  This love contains dark as well as light, the reality of change, the possibility of loss.  It is grounded in groundlessness and rooted in the divine.

In the ancient Hebrew story of God’s creation of the world, God spoke “Let there be light” and there was light in the darkness.  In this mythic telling of creation, God did not take away the dark but brought light to the dark. While my struggle to comprehend the mystery of suffering is unending, incomplete, I wonder if the darkness remains with us so that we might know the light, that we might know agape love? Does the darkness give us the gift of knowing the givenness of our belovedness, love and belonging beyond what we could ever achieve from our great, good, and self-driven efforts.  Does the darkness allow help us to offer this generosity to others through our actions in the world?

Afterall, what makes our beloveds precious but that we could lose them? Like many mothers and fathers, when my daughter was growing inside of me and then born, my life became an open prayer for her safety, health, and well-being.  If she did not face the possibility of suffering, how could I know this kind of connection to and love for her, this responsibility to her? If she were saved from illness, pain, death, wouldn’t she just be a toy to me?  A plastic doll I could pick up or put her down as my mind wanted.  

However imperfect I have been and remain as a mother, parenting opened my heart to encompass needs and desires beyond my own. As I grow in spiritual maturity, may my heart be stretched opened further to hold more of the world’s suffering in my prayers and addressed through my actions. 

I am invited to be with the lake through this transition from light to dark, warmth to cold, summer gathering to winter solitude. The season’s invitation to withdraw into itself, makes me very tender and alive.  It stirs in me a homesickness for what must be left behind, what must be carried forward, what is ever changing, what remains. 

I visit this lake when she is covered in ice and snow and her presence is far away from me. That it is painful to be with her now (the goosebumps, the shock of cold) and is starting her pilgrimage away from me draws me closer to her.  I give myself over to her, in presence now, in absence later, while I still can.



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