Near perfect conditions today, and the thoughts of the Bold and Beautiful turn to the summer swims. What would it be? A triple? a 6km? A 10km? Listening to the conversations it struck me that pretty much everyone has a different way to prepare, from building up to the distance over a few weeks to electrolyte drinks, to extra water to a banana to simply showing up and having a crack. Just to name a few
Some of this morning's swimmers
Newbie signing up
Dosed up with Vitamin Sea
Bindi did not swim
Nor did this pup
Lots and lots of swimmers
Just after the Let's Go at the Point
Happy to be back in the water
Shortly after birthday boy Rob's Let's Go
The distance swimmers gather at the Point and what a jolly bunch they are!
En route we encountered Elizabeth on her way back from Freshy
The weed bed at Freshy
Some happy 6ers
What a fabulous morning it was!
What am I listening to? I just listened to an album called I'm Your Fan on Youtbube Music. It's one of many tributes to Leonard Cohen. On the way home 702 radio was playing a piece about Jeff Buckley. Apparently his version of Hallelujah was a cover of John Cale's version. I'll let you be the judge of that
And now I have something really special for you. My friend David is a published and much awarded poet. I believe this offering was partly inspired by his children's school's refusal to allow him and his wife to take the children out of school to accompany David and his wife to the Northern Territory.
Tidal
David Adès
Now I am an endless swimming
in the restless seas of my children,
my muscles a constant burn and ache
keeping my head above the sparkle and glimmer and depths of them,
buffeted
by chop and swell, by wave after wave after wave,
by the vast oceans of their needs.
I could drift, inert, like seaweed,
but I must mediate the tug and pull
of their cross-currents,
watch the line of one daughter’s spine,
the shift of her shoulder-blades
as she sits on a piano stool spooling out notes,
apprehend the toddler
as he tears around the house on some manic mission
toothy-grinned and wicked with laughter,
contend with another daughter’s
relentless testing of boundaries.
Always, I watch for sharks and blood.
For so long
I have forgotten my needs except in tossing dreams in turn forgotten,
the fog of forgetting swirling thick
but there is no shame in conjuring them:
I need an island to beach myself upon,
the luxury of sand, palm trees, coconuts, a cold mango lassi
and a woman with open arms, a welcoming smile,
the invitation of her skin.
So much for dreams: the waves have me in their grip and I must swim on or sink.
Sometimes there are rhythms amid the turbulence,
the rhythm of a child’s breath in sleep,
the rhythm of school days when no one is sick
and nothing is forgotten, when routines click into place
without sudden squalls,
lashings of rain, howling winds
though nothing is given, the seas’ blue calm never more than mere interlude.
I take whatever interludes I get,
hauling myself onto some shore
to scratch a few words in the sand
only to watch them erased by the incoming tide.
In Darwin,
after the Mangrove boardwalk, where the girls took turns
in the hot sun reading signs
telling the story of the mangroves,
they walked on the beach, found pieces of coral
and shells, oceans to put to their ears,
and numerous holes in the sand,
a living world at their feet.
The school principal
declined applications for certificates of extended leave
deeming a week away from school
not to be within the girls’ best educational interests :
and we are stuck
with such a narrow definition of educational interests,
such obliviousness
and all it portends – the world at large
providing nothing educational —
not the mangroves or the beach,
not the knowledge of the mangroves shared by the First Peoples,
not the two hours they both spent intently peering through microscopes
in the Discovery Centre at the Museum
and making elaborate drawings
of sunflower pollen, hemp fibre, bottlebrush spore, cotton
fibre, fern spore, sponge gourd, common red sponge, wool, angora rabbit hair, mouse fur, cat hair, camellia leaf section, bamboo shoot, leaf of aelium, pine wood, stem of corn, nylon, onion rind, bemberg, pollen of lily,
not the rest of the day spent wandering through the Museum,
not the documentary of Aboriginal elders telling stories of their art,
not the exhibition of Aboriginal Art,
not standing before an artistic rendition of Maralinga
with all colour leached out and areas of smudged black and grey
and my explanation of the nuclear tests, the displacement and dispossession,
the blithe dismissal of culture,
not the wind-howling simulation of Cyclone Tracy,
not the photographs of Darwin’s destruction,
not the entire world beyond the classroom, the schoolyard —
so that even as I lay down rules,
as I set boundaries,
as father, as guardian, as shepherd of safety,
I am willing the breaking of them, the breaking through,
I secretly cheer the testing, the challenging,
constant and inevitable as the back and forth
of the tides,
as I navigate fatigue and childhood,
as I beach myself each night
while three worlds make themselves
whether I can keep up or not.
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