Tag Archives: Synchronized swimming

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diligence

I am a day behind on the A to Z Challenge but that’s ok! I started a day late anyhow….D for diligence. One of the 7 virtues. This is from the 7 Heavenly Virtues, a different list from the cardinal and theological virtues. Bravery is not on the Heavenly list. Diligence is the match for the sin “sloth“. This virtue does not double as an emotion, just as chastity does not double as an emotion. I can feel diligent but it’s not like saying, “I am a sloth today! I feel totally lazy!”

The photograph is from 2011, my daughter and another member of the synchronized swimming team. My daughter started at age 7 and could barely swim one length of the pool, much less two. She fell in love with it and continued until the team disbanded, and then moved on to swim team. It is a spectacularly difficult sport, to dance upside down in the water. They score on the Olympic scale right from the start, earning scores of 1 or 2 out of 10.

Here they are leading a land drill, with younger team members in the water. This is at a meet, so they are ready with their suits and hair pieces for the team performance.

There are so many things that can be approached with diligence that lead to the joy of doing something well and with one’s entire heart…..

ย Musicians work with great diligence too….here.

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Relax

For the Daily Prompt: relax.

Well, no, but they aren’t relaxed! This is my daughter and friends from her synchronized swim team in 2011. We have a home show in our small town each year and the parents and friends and grandparents and everyone is asked to come and see our girls perform their routines. They are waiting for the music to start….

But it relaxes me to see this photo and smile and remember. What a lot of work the parents put into supporting the team and driving to meets and making costumes and funding a new underwater speaker and then another one….

And still it makes me smile. And relax.

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Sink

Sink

I tried for a long time but now I am back in the water. My tail is back. I am so happy with it that for 20 minutes I just swim and dive and play with my own tail, chasing it. I am ready, strong again. I call my people and the waves.

I tried awfully hard on land. I hid the knife that my sisters bought. He married the other one and kept me in the little building in the garden. Everyone knew including her, it was normal for them. She didn’t enjoy his tidal pull, his pounding, the waves. It gave me so much joy. I sang without my tongue. My tongue was not cut out, that is a myth, one of those stories. It’s just that that is how they like the women: voiceless. Silent. Obedient. Admiring. Wounded: oh, he would kiss the poor feet, mangled jangled feet that I am forced to wear on land.

All for love. But: she had children. Three. And I watched as he treated the males as princes and ignored the girl. Mere princess, valueless, to be trained for a strategic wedding. Added value for the land, a pawn in training. She found me. And I pitied her and raised her and told her tales of my home, where people are people, not a gender. Not raised as a separate species.

She disobeyed and her father had her beaten, only where it would not show, and locked up. Bread and water. Cold and cruelty. And suddenly my love was slain. It was as if I was awakened and looked about and saw his cruelty to women and to his wife and his daughter and to me. I was a toy, an amusement, loved only if I kept silent and was crippled by my feet.

I rose and called the waves. The land flooded and the castle was broken and I reached the little princess in time to change her, to give her a tail too.

She is so surprised: in the water. She keeps trying to go up and breathe air and it chokes her. She swims in wild panicky circles, choking on the air, as I drag her out from the castle.

Now we are in the sea and the waters recede, full of broken bodies. Male bodies. I changed every woman I could find and the children if they were young enough and the girls. I called my family, my people. They came and each grabbed one, to drag towards the sea. The ex-humans fight and cough and wail and cry, but we drag them.

And now we sink, each holding one. We sink into the depths. They hold their breath, fighting, but we are so used to our tails and are stronger. And one by one they let the air go and breathe: and breathe the ocean. Breathe. We are entering the dark and the phosphorescent fishes come to see.

Soon we will be home. Just a little further into the ink black: sink.

 

I took the photograph in 2012 at the Pacific Northwest Synchronized Swimming Regionals. This is a young team routine with eight swimmers. These two are each lifted by three teammates, using only swimming, never touching bottom……

 

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Armour Suit II

Yesterday I had the massage that I have once every two weeks.

We talk first about muscles and illness and emotions. He is thinking that if we forget how to use certain muscles and put them in the “armor suit” then that is where our body will store toxins. After all, we aren’t using those muscles. Good storage place. And then that in turn is where illness or cancer could pop up.

I am talking about emotions: that the US culture seems to see certain emotions as “negative”. Anger, fear, grief. I asked my son what he thinks emotion is. His reply: “Chemicals?” I think emotions are neurological information. Information just as much as what our eyes see, our ears hear. If we label some emotions as “bad”, how can a child protect herself from a predator, from abuse, from a charming addict? If girls are supposed to be “nice” all the time, they have to suppress any “bad” emotions. Why would we suppress neurological information? And both my massage person and I think that stuffed emotions go into the armor suit. So toxins from the outside and toxins from the inside…. no wonder we get sick.

In the massage I am paying attention to each muscle, asking them to relax, rather then focusing on my breathing. I am also thinking that I am not sure my back is broad enough to carry what I want to carry, between work and family. I am asking the Beloved about that, sort of…. and then I have the sensation that my back is very broad. Enormous. Very very strong. I have small hips and an enormously strong back. I am 5’4″ and 130 pounds. Yet in this sensate dream, my back is as wide and strong as my friend who is 6’4″ and 220 pounds.

It’s not momentary. It goes on for thirty minutes or more. My latissimus dorsi are tight and sore, punching muscles. We talk about how we would both like to see grade school children taught to activate the slow twitch muscles, to loosen and drop the armor suit. Most of the physical education and sports are fast twitch. “Not synchronized swimming,” I say. The first formal move they are taught is to float on their back, legs straight. Hands controlling position. They slowly bend one knee and then straighten that leg up, and equally slowly lower and straighten it. This is called the ballet leg. My daughter started synchro at age 7 and had to do that at the meet. They were scored on the Olympic scoring from the start: the beginners scored in the 3 range.

“No,” he says, “synchronized swimming must use slow twitch. But that and Tai Chi are the only ones I can think of, and maybe some dance.” He says that I need to learn to release that energy: the wanting to punch, wanting to kick, instead of storing it in my muscles…. I have a heavy bag. I will make time.

I am silent, exploring the map of my back, strong and broad enough to carry much more than I thought….

This is our synchronized swimming team at our small local pool, doing the yearly show, in 2010. The five girls are in a routine and just starting a ballet leg in time to the music….

 

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I will fight no more

I am tired of fighting
I am tired of fighting for justice
I am tired of fighting discrimination
I am tired of fighting for health care for all

I am tired of fighting insurance companies
I am tired of fighting medicare’s contractee
I am tired of fighting for prior authorization
I am tired

I will fight no more forever

I heal
I am a healer
I am trying to heal patients
I am trying to help patients heal

I am a healer
I help heal cancer
I help heal heart disease
I help heal PTSD
I help

heal cancer
heal heart disease
heal PTSD
heal addiction

I am a healer

heal the insurance company
heal the medicare contractor
heal the pharmaceutical company
heal

heal anxiety
heal depression
heal addiction

I will fight no more forever

I heal

The legs in the photograph don’t look delicate, do they? They are strong and beautiful and powerful. I took this at the National Junior Synchronized Swimming Competition in 2009. Those girls on the edge of being women are strong, they are a team, they work and play together. They have the skills and the strength to lift their bodies out of the water that far using their arms… think about the practice and strength needed to do that. We all want to heal and create fun and play and beauty. Let’s work as a team.

also on everything2.com

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Sea of Love

I go in the sea
of dreams
open the chest
the trunk
the saddlebags
Empty the dirty laundry
Of emotion
On the floor
Grief and joy
Fear and hope
Mine
All mine

There is a place
Beyond words
I see you in that place
It is very old
And very young
It is so frightening to go there
Lose words
The first time
It is haunted and hunted
Are you aware
Of that place
Do you go there
Of your own volition?
Or do you struggle
Fight and suffer in the
Choppy boundary between air and water
Fear drowning
Water surrounds you
Above you too
You are in the wordless place
Over your head
Are you too deep?

Open your eyes
In the green water light
A mermaid waits to lead you
To a rope to a raft
And me

But first you must open your eyes

 

I did not take this photo: it was taken at the Weyerhaeuser Pool in Seattle in 2009 at the National Junior Synchronized Swimming Competition. The professional photographer asked our girls to jump in so that he could get some practice shots from the underwater window. No one else was allowed down to that window. My daughter was in her third year of synchro and already so comfortable in the water that she and the others just mugged and played….

First published on everything2.com.

The Honeydrippers: Sea of Love

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Water

W for water in the Blogging from A to Z.

Water, water, water. After my mother died of ovarian cancer in 2000, I went to therapy in 2002. I dreamed of water, over and over again.

The photograph is from the 2009 National Junior Synchronized Swimming Competition, in Federal Way, Washington. Cameras with removable zoom lenses were not allowed. There was a professional photographer. I had an electronic camera given to me by my father, with a formidable built in zoom. Synchro is difficult to photograph because they are in the middle of the pool and they are under water at least half the time. I had been practicing taking pictures of my daughter’s intermediate level team and would time the electronic delay to try to catch lifts.

We were at the Junior Nationals volunteering to help. This earned our team points for the northwest district and it takes many volunteers to run the contests.

This is an eight person Junior team at Nationals and six of them are under water. They are not allowed to push off from the bottom. They all have to be in position to do the lift and the person lifted has to be strong and balanced and ready. Two people are being lifted here: the woman below supporting the woman above and in turn, being supported and lifted by the rest of the team. I chose this photo because of the strength, athleticism, balance and teamwork. The team members swim so closely together that they kick and scratch each other. Or fall on each other in a lift. I want all humanity to have this kind of teamwork and lift each other.

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Open

O for open: open water and open heart, for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I kept thinking O for ocean, but the photos that I want to use are not of the ocean but of a lake. My daughter and I were there in 2012. She was a synchronized swimmer for seven years and then joined swim team in eighth grade. We went to the lake and she practiced distance swimming. She is used to a 1950s 20 yard pool. She started at the lake by swimming to a little island we call Kidnap Island. I canoed while she swam, and my cousin’s daughter came along on the first trip. They left the lake soon after that. My daughter swam farther and farther every day, with me in a canoe to ensure that no power boat would run her over.

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We were on our way to the parking lot one day, when a power boat slowed. “Long way out, aren’t you? All alone?” said one of the men. I was in a small one person canoe that only weighs 18 pounds and is really tippy. I wouldn’t take it out in any sort of nasty weather.

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“No, I am with my daughter.” I pointed to the water.

“She’s swimming? Where did you start?” he said.

I pointed back to our cabin. Far enough that he couldn’t see it.

“Really? She swam that far?” He and his friend watched my daughter power along.

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“Yes. Swim team.”

“Is she swimming to the parking lot?” The cars were still really distant.

“Yes and probably back, too.”

“Wow. I thought it was a long way for a canoe!”ย  They drove on, shaking their heads.

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Open water and open heart. It takes practice to swim that far. I swim about two days a week, about a mile in the pool. My daughter shakes her head: the swim team swims three to five miles at each practice, and she swims six days a week in the season. She considers me a wuss. I consider her a calorie burning machine.

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It takes practice to keep an open heart. That is what I need in my rural family medicine clinic. An open heart allows space and expansion and time for people to open up. To say things that are bothering them or frightening them or grieving them. I am back at work now for two weeks, but by the end of the day yesterday, I was tired, tired, tired, as if I had swum across that lake. I need to rest sometimes…..