one, two, three... solstice

one month a swim: June

One Month A Swim is a monthly update, where I look 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 to Another World is Possible, you are so welcome! And if you’re not so new, thank you for being here!

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The alarm clock went off at 4.30am on the longest day of the year, a crackly song in the half light, and we woke up, B and I, to an already bright morning. Drowsily, we got ready for a sunrise swim – a choreography of oft-rehearsed steps performed in near complete silence, but for the creak of the floorboards and the rustle of clothes being pulled on. The tide clock by the front door showed one hour to high tide, as we stepped out into the dew-cloaked midsummer morning. A song thrush was busy pecking at unseen sustenance in the front garden. There were birds, so many birds – a skyful of them tweeting and cawing, flitting and flying.

Across the narrow railway bridge, the sky glowed pink and orange and the sea was a shiny gold coin, as if to brighten the sky some more – a vignette hemmed in by silhouetted rooftops.

Like in a game of ‘un, deux, trois, soleil’¹, we hurried down to the cove before the sun appeared at 4.57. But it peeked over the horizon a few minutes earlier than forecasted – a gold crescent rising from the sea, catching us as we peered over the wall down to the beach below. But with a tide that high and a sea that still, we eschewed it, opting for the steps instead.

Standing shoulder-deep on the bottom step, I got in first, then turned to B. He dunked, gladness washing over his face as he came up again, as if baptised. We kissed. Happy Solstice, I said.

Six months ago to the day, we stood outside the neolithic monument of Newgrange, in the Boyne Valley, to watch the winter solstice sunrise. Solstice means “sun stands still”, and it is indeed a pause – the pause before the turn, similar to how the tide goes slack before turning. As I looked at the sun dripping a trail of honeyed light on the sea, I thought about cycles – how they contain one another; how the pinnacle of the solar year holds the seed of the descent, and vice versa. The sun may have reached its zenith, but the descent into the darker half of the year starts now, at the pause of midsummer, pregnant with winter, with darkness. And for once, this thought didn’t make me sad. There was just so much light – the impossibly long, dancing solstice light.

Stretch, B said just before I dived in from the steps.

It was quickly decided we’d go up to the jumping spot on the rocks. He went first as I took photos of his dive, his glowing body flying through the air and slicing through water.

My turn.

Afraid of slipping and falling, I made my careful way to the spot; it used to be a flat, if narrow, concrete pad, but storms have worn it down to a steep incline leaning towards the sea. I stood there, trying to remember to stretch, tuck my chin in, push off, keep my legs straight.

It was something the late Andrea Gibson said in a commencement speech shared this month by their widow megan falley – that courage is not about not being terrified, but being terrified and doing something anyway.

And so I dived.

I inhaled, and threw myself towards the looming dark green-blue water.

It wasn't the most elegant dive – more like falling Buzz-Lightyear style. But I did it, and I haven't felt this alive in a long time!

Thinking back to last year’s rather murky, misty solstice, and after countless weeks, months even, of health issues and doctor appointments and low energy, not to mention the tentacular grief, this midsummer has been one of soft skies and blooming light, calling me into fierce clarity; calling me outward, into the redemptive openness of the world where I don’t need to clutch my troubles so tightly.

On the eve of solstice, I kept an eye on the sunset sky behind the Little Sugarloaf and over the sea to the northwest – a band of gold over the horizon, topped by a deepening blue above. So much brightness, so late in the day. Did it get dark at all?

Thank you for reading. It means more than you know. Until next time,

Much love,
Annette

on/off the page…

+ Just as we settled in a bright holiday home near the Causeway Coast, on the first weekend of June, an email pinged on my phone announcing that my flash non-fiction piece earthbound was selected as a finalist in the Wild Atlantic Writing Awards! 500 words on the theme of "Power" was the requirement for submission, and my little essay inspired by a family visit to Titanic Belfast turned out to be just the ticket! Thank you Ireland Writing Retreats – I guess I'll just keep writing so.

+ Just over a week later, and following on from the Speak Up! workshop I took in early May, I read my own words in public for the first time at Words By The Sea, co-hosted by the wonderful Siobhan Mac Mahon, for a lovely audience of fellow writers and word lovers. I loved every minute of it, nerves and wobbles and all!

I got to be there only because a procedure due two days before the event was postponed last minute. And the whole evening, something was on my mind that Nelly Bryce shared – luck is strategic alignment.

So, of course I read earthbound, the flash non-fiction piece recently selected as a finalist in the Wild Atlantic Writing Awards.

“I slid into the cold, blue blanket of the sea, and I swam out, out towards the moon, at the mercy of forces way beyond my control, but not beyond their care.”

In June I loved…

• Constellations: Reflections from life by Sinéad Gleeson (2019)

  “The body is an afterthought” is the opening sentence of this book that makes me rethink what memoir can be and do.

  On the day I started reading it, just as I was looking at when to go to London with my daughter to see the Ana Mendieta retrospective at Tate Modern, she shared this note –

• The Day I Made God Laugh Twice, a darkly comic essay by Bayan Haddad in the latest issue of Irish lit mag The Stinging Fly, on the absurdity and cruelty of life under occupation in Palestine.

  “This is how I ended up on Bumble. I did not download it because I was searching for love, or even for a date, in any conventional sense. What good is a match twenty kilometres away when those twenty kilometres include a checkpoint, a wall, and a requirement for a permit one does not have?”

• Notes from a burning Paris, by the inimitable Sarah Wilson, on what it actually looks and feels like to live through systemic collapse. Because “the heat is one thing. But the on-the-ground reality of managing the resulting complex, interconnected, unpredictable and dominoing fallout is another.”

  Notes from a burning Paris

• this poem by Victoria Erickson

  

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1. ‘Un, deux, trois, soleil’ is French for the children’s game of ‘statues’, a.k.a. ‘green light, red light’