One Month A Swim is a newsletter looking back on the month that was through my sea swimming, but also through the things that caught my eye and ears, and most importantly, my heart. If you’re new here, welcome! And if you’re not so new, thank you for sticking around!
On the morning of the Moon Fire Circle, briefly, the sky went on fire as I prepared a flask of tea in the kitchen. I walked down to the beach an hour early, for sunrise. The sea stretched calm and clear, wrinkled and creased by the mild breeze, below a ribbon of salmon pink light, a skyful of grey-blue clouds above. Nobody about.
I crouched down by the water, heels dug in the coarse wet sand, to look at the slow corkscrew of unhurried waves unfurling along the beach, and at the auburn reflections on the sea. Sometimes a gust powerful enough pressed a fast-moving, fleeting imprint on the surface. The sun was about to break through a hole in the clouds, so I stripped down to my swimsuit and waded in.
I swam out towards the light, hung in the cold sea with my eyes closed. Warm breeze on my face, cold water seizing my body. I swam and drifted further than anticipated, then swam back in easily, carried and lifted by the soft roll of the waves. Six minutes in of utter peace and Brigid prayers.
Blue clouds, blue sea, pale yellow light streaming on the soothing sea. My intention for this season is to keep tending my creative fire, to keep moving in the direction of my dreams.
My workspace consists of the kitchen table, on which I set my laptop, and a child-sized table, its dusty dirty white surface disappearing under teetering book piles, notebooks, scrap paper and old printouts, my headset, and an old TV license bill; plus a shoe cabinet in the next room whose top I use as a bookshelf.
To write, I sit on an old Ikea office chair, black but for the plaid draped over it – a handwoven wool throw in checkered dawn colours: yellow, orange, pink, mauve, magenta, with a spot of cerulean blue and soft apple green.
A space of one’s own
I want to honour my creativity by setting up a beautiful space of my own, to show I’m taking it seriously. Calling in the writing by making space for it: look, I’ve made a cosy nest for you, welcome home. Making space in my life for this creature: my writing, always new.
“Protect it as best you can, as though it were a delicate bird egg. We are going to make a safe space in which to write: a home for our words.”
So I got rid of the messy wee table. Within a couple of hours, I sorted out my stuff, relocating some in the kitchen dresser and discarding the rest, including the table itsef.
I’m also making space in my journals, by trying to organise my note taking. And it’s hard. Old habits, for one, but also my resistance to buying more notebooks when I already have so many, and to starting on a blank page, not knowing where to begin or how to do it – so many options, so many words and ideas and quotations scribbled all over with little hope of ever seeing the light of day again. Making space for more clarity too, so old habits don’t cloud my vision of what’s possible.
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
Anne Lamott
One morning a week, on Tuesday or Wednesday after the school run, I go to the swimming pool for an hour or so. No ifs, no maybes, no talking myself out of it: for this one hour, swimming is what I do. Because I’m a swimmer.
I’m also a writer. And so I need to make space in my days to pour out words onto the page – to make writing the default, short assignments and shitty first drafts all the way (to paraphrase Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird).
You see, I have become ambitious about my writing – ambitious to learn more and hone my craft, through a steady practice and relevant courses, in order to write the words waiting to come through me.
Instead of indulging my inner Calimero (a tiny black chick in a cartoon of my 1980s childhood whose catchphrase is, “This is really so unfair”), I’m taking small everyday steps in the direction of my dreams. I have stopped treating my writing like a hobby allowed only when everything else got ticked off the never-ending to-do list, like an embarrassing little secret that should only be mentioned when it abides by our culture’s metrics of success: constant growth in follower numbers and income generated. The key word here is little: I’ve never allowed my writing to breathe, never granted it any space to grow, never protected it with fierce boundaries, other than that of secrecy.
There has been a shift – and it’s not simply due to my children growing up. Instead of chasing a dream that isn’t mine, and berating myself for not “making it”, I am putting in the work. The time and the space and the work.
I applied to a mentoring programme with the Irish Writers Centre, for which I provided a writer’s CV – something I didn’t even know existed, let alone having created one before. Even if I don’t get picked, it won’t have been a waste of time. Applying has been a learning experience by and of itself, and it also signals my intention: my intention to learn more and skill up, to meet my book along the way, to move in the direction of my dreams.
Making beautiful space (for miracles), in the face of unrelenting ugliness and cruelty.
Chafing, rubbing, screeching is the dissonance between making a space of my own, while the people of Gaza, men, women, children, all of them humans, are violently, lethally bombed out of whatever space they manage to make for themselves in the smouldering remains of their homeland. While they are trapped between Israel’s bombs and Egypt’s closed border, I keep going about my mundane yet precious life. Making space for art, for miracles, for a new world to nest in and hatch. For my story, other stories, all the stories, to be told. For love to roost and grow. It was Valentine’s Day not so long ago after all.
Toni Morrison said,"The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story.
Risk freeing someone else.
Anne Lamott
Unapologetically is a word I think about a lot.
Becoming more ambitious about my writing is not a frivolity or self-indulgence. It’s a necessity. It’s how I take action. Not everybody can march, protest, organise – such bittersweet relief to understand this at last. I was always meant to just write. Write the world as it is – the beauty and the love, the loss and the grief, and still, to make home in the world. Unapologetically.
Leap year
At 25, I left my job in Paris and the only country I had ever known to go to London and be with my Irish boyfriend of only a few months, hopping across the English Channel every other weekend. It didn’t seem like a big leap at the time, only the natural next step. Twenty-four years later, people call me brave (or crazy!) for swimming in the cold Irish Sea all year round. I was 42 when I learnt to swim properly and took my first plunge. To this day, Brian and the sea both continue to teach me all I need to know about taking risks and feeling held.
This newsletter is reaching you on the day that makes a whole year leap forward, the intercalary day cleaving a space of its own in the calendar. It’s a gift of a day, a miracle almost, granted to us by the earth’s queer refusal to spin within a strict timeline.
“A true miracle is the most natural thing,” I heard
say on the Numinous podcast. “When I'm moving in the right direction, the world comes to meet me, often in the form of synchronicities, telling me I’m exactly on time.”Let us leap in the direction of our dreams, calling in miracles. Trusting that the earth will hold us, always.
DREAM: I found this word on the kitchen counter, big white block letters on an azure background; a bookmark that fell out of a schoolbag. It’s going in my notebook of audacious dreams.
In February I loved…
The 79 Squares by Malcolm J Bosse
I have recently become reunited with an old friend – a friend who entered my life when I was 13 or so, during a family holiday in the French Alps. And it has stayed with me ever since.
This friend that I speak of is actually a book, The 79 Squares by Malcolm J Bosse. It is the story of the unlikely friendship between Mister Beck, an elderly man who spent 40 years in jail, and Eric, a wayward teenager on police probation for vandalising school property.
And after many years of holding it in my Amazon basket, I finally treated myself to the latest English edition (available only from France, as it turned out). It’s so old. 1979. Les 79 Carrés.
I never forgot the title, or the author’s name, or even the green and blue cover of the French edition, library copy that I read. Reading it again, I experienced, just like Eric in Mister Beck's garden, a bending of space and time. Suddenly I was back in the bedroom I shared with my sister in that cool, spacious groundfloor holiday apartment: sunlight streaming though the window, my sister lying beside me on the bed, and me, sitting back against the headboard, compulsively reading, heart often racing, lost in space and time.
The chat I had with memoirist
on the interaction and the frictions between a parent’s creative pursuits and caring duties. We went deep and wide, talking about language and raising bilingual children, why I call myself a reformed climate activist, and of course sea swimming! The interview will be available to watch in a couple of weeks – I’ll keep you posted.“Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it. Freedom fighters may not always win, but they are always right.”
These words I read in Bird by Bird: Instructions on writing and life, by Anne Lamott, the same week that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was killed in an Arctic penal colony. Freedom fighters may not always win, but they are always right.
Nature Loves Courage, a poem by Terence McKenna recently shared by
.
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed. And there’s no other way to do it.
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Disclosure: Buying any of the books recommended in this post may earn me a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.
Hi Annette, loved reading of your new writing ritual. Following Kerri's advice I am working on mine also. Look forward to hearing you talk about becoming a reformed activist. It is something that speaks to me too. Be well, Laura
Gorgeous post! 🌊 🖋️