Dark Water Swimming.
In the absence of facing my fears, I fall out of the practice of vulnerability. I know this is no way to live. How do you crack open a heart?
The water is silk as I enter the ocean, effortlessly sliding over my skin until I’m embraced, full-bodied. Wrapped in a soft, salt-water blanket that will later dry crisp on my skin. The water is so clear I can see the outline of the crescent moon scar a childhood tangle left of my right hand. As I begin to move through it, my body in motion with and in the roll of the tide, I see the floor of the ocean falling further away.
I have been called brave in my life. Brave, vulnerable, full of courage, honest — it is quite a collection of words. We get so clumsy with language sometimes, using words interchangeably that do not belong to each other. These words each have their own very sharp and particular purpose. Sometimes I am all of them, often none.
In this moment there is no necessity for bravery because I have no fear. I am swimming in the Caribbean ocean and there is no trace of dark water here. For a moment I delve into body memory and the freedom of floating in a blissful haze.
When you are nine years old, in that great in-between summer that stretched on for days and you spend your hours collecting freckles, leaping into whatever body of water you can find. Minutes become hours as you float on your back in the sea, the sun beating down through closed eyelids until everything is rosy-pink and you almost see stars on the inside of your skin. I remember the small details of my body; licking salty sea dust off my shoulder, filled with curiosity about water that can be so soft and still leave your skin feeling gritty and crisp as it dries.
It was sometime after that summer, I became afraid of the dark water. The kind you can’t look through, that pushes a shiver down your back. Somewhere a dark dumpy wave spat me onto a pebbly shore and I grazed my chin. Another somewhere my toes were skinned against a sharp underwater rock and the salt water stung. Schools of bait fish skirted past my ankles and my right foot skirted under the wing of a ray resting in the bay before it flapped over me and away. Somewhere else, Steve Irwin was stabbed through the heart by a stingray and I stopped looking for kōura under the Tarawera lake jetty. Instead I became wary of the old grandaddy eels hiding in the low waters. Somewhere after that summer, these memories collected themselves and put up a signpost in my mind - we don’t go near the dark water.
Lost: my childhood delight and freedom in physical, immersive joy for the fear of what might wait beneath and what pain may come.
Bravery is sometimes walking fearless into the water and sometimes walking fear into the water with you. The difference is often denoted by silence. Not a single soul has known how the dark water unlocks fear in me, that little curl in my stomach and sudden awareness of extremities.
Three summers ago, I dived off a boat into the dark and murky waters of a lake in the American South. Eventually heat and humidity contend with my irrationality. This is not bravery either, I am hiding in silence and pretend. I longed for home and the clean, clear lakes of my childhood. I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes underwater. I gave myself to the sensation of cool lake water and brought myself back within moments. There was realisation — for all I couldn’t see, I began to understand with clarity how easy it is to appear brave and vulnerable, just by sharing what no longer scares you.
This is how words become fuzzy and meaning becomes transpositional. To be brave is to show courage and face danger, not simply to hide your fear with silence and avoidance. Being vulnerable is to take the risk of emotional or physical wounding, a soft exposure of our tender Achilles heel. Vulnerability can be measured in the sincerity of an apology, where the apologiser comes open-handed to resolve the matter and willing to take on the wound of misjudgement.
I have observed this in my own work; my ability to untangle and wrestle truths into words that no longer hold the power of shame over me or the danger of the unseen. Wrestling myself into wholehearted acceptance removes the sting of vulnerability in the same way a filter removes sediment from dark, muddy waters. Often when I have been called brave or vulnerable in my work or my words, it is only appearing to be so because I am sharing from the bucket of Resolved Shame and Faced Fears. This bucket of insights and transformations become the power in my daily life - the filter that turns dark water to clear.
In the dark water, I am irrationally afraid of the unseen dangers — starting with losing control and leading to pain or even Death. These are deep, visceral and human fears, layered with questions of mortality, hope and an even bigger question, ‘how will I live beyond this?’. Fear, like every other emotion, is a messenger but one that should prompt us to action, to bravery.
We are dark-water swimming right now, facing questions of danger and mortality seemingly in every corner. The very air surrounding us is as dark and murky as any Southern lake I ever could swim in. All at once, our society is grappling with fear and determining what action to take in response to the message that all is not well.
At a macro-level, it seems regardless of our personal fears around sickness, mortality and the impact of a global pandemic — we are all swimming for shore, for the shallows and hoping to find clarity.
While the world is swimming for clear water, I’m wading in the other direction.
I swam in the ocean each day this summer. As I practiced walking my fear into the water, I fell deeper and deeper into the tide. I swam out to the dark water, through the plush seaweed pools gathered after the summer storm. I gave myself to enjoying being far from shore where my feet don’t touch the ground. I trusted the power of my body to move me from one end of the tide to the other. I let the sun push stars against my eyelids again. I practiced facing the fear in my body.
When I got back to the city, I spent a week swimming in a pool. Where there is nothing to fear, I swim in the water all day long, like the childhood fish I was. I realised my response to murky water of the world has been to live with one foot in the shallows and the other on the shore, waiting. Just waiting.
From the outside, this appears out of character for me — I am always moving, hardly ever waiting, with only one secret exception. Inside my heart. Here in my deep, internal world — I’ve been waiting for years, ever since the last slicing wound. A collection of disappointments in work, love and hope that formed a little narrative that I tucked away in the dark. I’ve been waiting for clear waters, waiting for fearless pools to swim in, a place without risk — the equivalence of waiting for a place where no bravery is required before diving back into the deep.
I must be brave and courageous after all, because on this revelation there is urgency in my blood, an impatient race to the water’s edge. I recognise that in the absence of facing my fears, I fall out of the practice of vulnerability and feel the urgency to put it right. I know this is no way to live. I must practice facing the fear in my heart.
The dark water is full of trepidation but it also carries mystery, possibility and curious things unknown. It is curiosity and quest that are leading me back into the dark water and demanding I crack myself open enough for new discovery and the birth of new possibilities. The unseen beneath the dark water is calling me in to see whatever is beneath the glassy waves. Maybe it’s much clearer underneath the surface than I think.
I have a desire for something new, some new understanding of myself and myself in the world around me. A dark and open water swimmer.
In the dark water, the only time my fear is lessened is when I do not swim alone. In mutual vulnerability, we build thoughtful trust with each other. As we lean into ourselves we have more power to lean into Others, more ability to find empathy and courage for the collective. We must find space for fear and bravery to offer us their reciprocal gift: renewed strength and more added to the bucket of Resolved Shame and Faced Fears.
Found: A desire for dark water swimming and a question: ‘How do you crack open a heart?’