When I was a kid I wouldn’t even put my face in the water. It took an entire summer of swimming lessons and then some. I was afraid of…everything.
My grandmother couldn’t swim. She was probably afraid to really try, given that she tended to focus on ways that the world could harm us. My mom isn’t a fan of the water either. She gets seasick and doesn’t even like to drive over bridges.
Eventually I overcame my water phobia and began to crave it instead. By the time I was 12 I spent entire summers by the pool, when I wasn’t busy watching Grease on VHS. One summer I watched it 75 times.
I wasn’t a big fan of swimming in muddy lakes, but if that’s all I had access to at the time, I did it. I shivered in disgust when whatever was at the bottom of the slimy lake squished between my toes and light swishes of something passed through my legs. But I stayed in the water.
While I can’t pinpoint why I feel compelled to be in or near water, Wallace Nichols has an idea.
In a recent article in Experience Life magazine, Nichols wrote, “Because bodies of water change and stay the same simultaneously, we experience both soothing familiarity and stimulating novelty when we look at them.”
“This is regularity without monotony, the perfect recipe for triggering a state of involuntary attention in which the brain’s default network — essential to creativity and problem solving — gets triggered. This dreamy state of involuntary attention is a key characteristic of Blue Mind.”
Over the past two months I’ve come to learn more about my lifelong relationship with water. It has begun to inspire my work and the way that I live my life. I’m looking forward to sharing more of it with you.
Stormy Sea is a high quality print reproduction of an abstract painting that I created in 2015.
Available for purchase exclusively at Minted