Abstract
This poetic article explores the relationship between water and ecology and how an embodied awareness and insights surface out of the practice of swimming. The connections between the inner and outer landscapes of waterways and the land are written into being as they nourish embodied resonances. Moving and writing are inextricably linked and open a syntax of poetry and prose founded in the rhythm of a swimming practice. Themes of yearning, longing, timelessness, existence, and creativity emerge out of these visceral explorations. The article integrates poetry and photographic images of the author’s swimming practice. Water stories is situated within the methodologies of embodied inquiry and poetic inquiry and supports the intersection and layers between what it means to think, move, and write in performative ways.
the poem, body, water all have a place to enter exist in relation sea stars have their own syntax my limbs, their arms the inevitable yearning to connect
Celeste Nazeli Snowber swimming 1.
I am from the water—made of water. I dwell in an aging body, full of fluid, flow, freedom, and fragility. My creative and scholarly work is informed and transformed through water. Here I find an intimacy to what is material, mater and what matters—the pedagogy of place where I listen to interior and exterior seascapes. My lifelong swimming practice and more recently a cold swimming practice open a relationship with ecology that is potent for cultivating awareness of waterways, seas, rivers, and lakes. Needing water to survive, we are a planet endangered by pollution, a warming climate, and melting ice. These poetic ruminations from my swimming practice are an extension of my decades of scholarly and artistic work which intersect listening, dancing, and writing, from and through the body. I walk and write. I dance and write. I swim and write. Words are birthed from my skin, bone, joints, and cells, which turn blood into ink. Breath transforms to the page, and orality is close to the moving, sensuous body which spills and leaks into artistic creation and scholarship. Moving and writing are close to my viscera. As one who was raised in an island town in the Atlantic coast off Boston, I was schooled in the curriculum of the sea. The sea is full of plankton and promise, a prose unto itself. As someone who now lives on the edge of the Coast Salish Sea in British Columbia, I still inhabit the waters here, but more often I release my limbs and torso to lakes. The lake is my second lover, the sea always being my first. The sea, the salt is within me. My tears are a similar consistency of saline to the ocean. Human beings are made of salt and water—made of many things, but most of all, I come back to water. Writing poems and poetic and embodied forms of inquiry is where I excavate my inner longings and yearnings. Here I find voice to articulate the relationship between the inner and outer landscape of water and earth. I am regrounded, and rewatered, given nourishment through the land and water.
water is central to what matters the mater of earth mater of mother belly of the land birthing through liquid we are cleansed through and in your medicine born anew
Celeste Nazeli Snowber swimming 2.
can bodies of water hold their history/herstory? there are as many bands of light penetrating the sea as stories held in your ecology underneath the surface
under the water is a pocket of infinity timelessness exists here I enter what existence is what I’m created for
Celeste Nazeli Snowber swimming 3.
what does the ache inside teach yearning is tangible one cannot hold the sea only swim through its properties we are the property of water and wind calling the flesh home to be in the in-between in praise of the liminal
Celeste Nazeli Snowber swimming 4.
I feel my naked legs and arms leave from water to air multiple reaches to light from the inside of darkness as if I had wings seagulls glide meet my exhale ocean swim at dusk
water waits for us welcomes our being the water outside is the water within schooled in the mystery of liquid wisdom we are intracellular fluid bodies of water this is how resilience lives
Footnotes
Author’s Note
This collection of poetry connected to swimming is birthed out of my swimming practice; it will be part of a larger collection. I am thankful for Chris Randle, a dance photographer who took these images of me swimming. I am deeply grateful to work, play, create, swim, and live on many Coast Salish nations. In particular, I live on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ -speaking peoples who stewarded these lands and waterways for time immemorial.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
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