Category Archives: swimming

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the luxury of space

For the Daily Prompt: simplify.

We say we want simpler lives, but do we? The Olympics are starting. I took this at the 2012 National Synchronized Swimming event. It was anything but simple. Teams of eight girls, often with two alternates, with gear and parents and coaches, converging from all over the country. Hours and hours of practice, elaborate swimsuits, music, hair fixed in place for the performance, lifts out of the water.

The front part of the pool is empty. The teams of girls are along the edge, warming up, getting ready for competition. There were over thirty teams. Not simple at all.

Magazines portray houses with a shelf or a table, empty except for a vase and a single book. My books escape their shelves and careen around the house, in spite of my little free library… My house does not look like those magazines, but I love it.

What does simplify mean? For me, it is not the empty surfaces. I admire those but don’t much aspire to them. For me it means spending quiet time every day listening to my heart and doing my inner work.

Blessings.

 

 

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bears

Those aren’t bears! Oh, yes… this is the New Year’s Polar Bear Plunge and these intrepid swimmers are now Polar Bears. The plunge is at noon on Marrowstone Island. A cannon is fired and people jump off the dock and into the water, cold Salish Sound water, in the low fiftys. Brrrr. The ambulance crew stands by and family and friends to witness this transformation into bears for the day.