RIPPLES...

Back from our intensive trip to Germany I am trying to find ground again here in England, collect my thoughts and my soul and let everything slot back into it’s place, it’s rhythm. It feels uncomfortable and slightly ungrounded to be neither there nor quite fully here- images, emotions, faces, voices, vignettes still flowing, rippling through me. My dad’s 80th Birthday and my speech to him, something I would have never thought possible in times when our relationship was strained- I am very grateful for this.
Walks in the hills and on a wild mountain and lots and lots of wonderful, nourishing food! From Bavaria via a slick train to my hometown and then to the Black Forest to stay with my oldest friend Gabriele- I had not been back for over six years. Three places, spanning thirty years of my life. Sometimes there were many layers of time present: like on a walk with my dad and Maz, my partner on the hill in my hometown; suddenly we heard some silly songs sung from behind hedges: the same as when I when I was sent to a children’s holiday camp at exactly the same spot about 35 years ago! While my dad told us a story of the time, shortly after the war, when he as a young man worked for the Americans in Nuremberg and how he ended up in prison for one night for stealing sugar. And then there we were all together in the here and now, having delicious iced coffee with vanilla ice cream… before saying good bye and parting for England…

And then the German lakes! It’s a magic I miss here, to swim in a lake still as a mirror, with clear emerald water or slightly brown one from the moors, being enveloped and embraced in a different way than the sea does, a more gentle, still way.
Swimming in these lakes I find a quality of calmness like no other. There is something that feels truly perfect when I am immersed completely: there is only the regular stroke of my arms, the rhythm of my breath, so slowly and deliberately that I forget after a while that it is me creating it. There is the glittering of the water and the mountains in the background, the subtle sound of water being parted and a steady movement forward without any haste…. a unison of movement, breath and perception. Occasionally there is a fish coming to the surface with a subtle ‘blubb’, a bubbling-sound, reminding me of all the life underneath and that I am really only skimming the surface…
If we had such lakes here and it would be warm all year round, this would be my perfect meditation practice: because somehow I completely stop thinking when I am swimming and there is a sense of oneness, timelessness, feeling part of something much bigger which is exhilarating and freeing….
‘Water, ever yielding, is not destroyed. Although it does not linger, it lasts forever’
I love how the light and mood ever changes on water. Even the mountains in the background can disappear and return so quickly; I’ve seen thunderstorms brewing over lakes and utter calmness.

I remember being told to come out of the water after maybe hours in the sea; blue lipped, wrapped in a big towel and happy I sat shivering in our Strandkorb, the colourful engulfing seats so typical for the German North Sea coast.
Snorkelling in the Mediterranean sea in the first crystal clear water I knew I swam for hours and crossed a small channel, maybe an hour’s swim each way, accompanied by my mum in our little inflatable boat, allowing me to feel adventurous and free, yet save.
And yes, there was the time when I swam out far too far in Sweden and could have been swept out to the open sea and drowned- this taught me utter respect for the sea!

Writing this something scratches my grey cells wanting to surface: a quote I read a long time ago by Margaret Atwood about time and water from her novel ‘Cat’s Eye’. After much searching I found it in German in one of my old diaries and I apologise for the coarse translation:
‘One doesn’t look backwards at time along a straight line, but rather into it and down as through water. Sometimes this comes to the surfaces and that, sometimes nothing at all. Nothing ever goes away.’
I want to return to some calm and rhythm in my life here after this adventurous journey into my past and the ripples it made. I like the image of the pond, letting my mind settle like its surface.
It is difficult to be still. Difficult just to be, but the lakes help. The memory of the lakes inside of me.