WEATHERING THE SEA TOGETHER
Entering the cold sea is an ordeal. If you are to have any chance of entering the cold
sea and swimming, you cannot do so with a thermometer built into every sense. You
have to switch off the judging mind and refrain from making an ice-cold assessment
of the temperature. The cold simply is what it is. If you want to try sea swimming, you
must allow the sea to receive and embrace you. Gasping and screaming will get you
nowhere. You have to walk calmly into the water and gently let yourself sink into it.
After the first sharp intakes of breath, you begin to breathe in rhythm with the waves
until you become almost one with this elemental force. And the sea begins to feel
warmer once your circulation and breathing have brought you into rhythm with it, and
you find yourself held in the one embrace that encircles the entire Earth and
resonates with the movement of the planets and stars. Entering the sea is a practical
ontological exercise for us as earthly beings, much like climbing the highest peaks.
When you emerge from the sea and restore your body heat in the hot tub, the
atmosphere is quite different from that of swimming-pool hot tubs, where
conversations often turn into heated debates over the issues of the day. Just as sea
swimming teaches us that the sea is neither cold nor warm but simply is as it is, so it
frees thought from the constraints of yes and no, of either-or. We become like
seaweed dancing where land and sea meet, mediating between the two. Somehow,
everyone becomes equal in the sea, and there is no need to compete to say the
smartest thing: the swim has reset us mentally, intellectually, and emotionally.
In Sigríður Rut Marrow’s photographs, we encounter a group of women who meet
regularly to spend time together in the sea. With bright yellow swimming caps on
their heads, these women remind us of the Icelandic fishermen who were long
recognisable by their yellow sou’westers. The women are also seafarers, but they do
not set out to make a catch and bring their haul ashore. They find themselves in the
sea and overcome their fear of the cold and the depths. “I managed this; I can do
this, float here in the cold sea.”
In fact, their focus is not on the swimming itself, but on being in the sea, on being
with it. Here they also learn their own limits, for sea swimmers develop a profound
respect for the elemental force of the ocean. The sea is never the same, and every
encounter with it is a new beginning. Sea swimming is therefore also a practical
phenomenological exercise in taking things as they are at any given moment and in
trimming one’s sails to the wind on the turbulent seas of life.
When I see this group of women sea swimmers at the beach in Nauthólsvík, I sense
how they get a break from themselves for a while in the sea, and yet are seldom
more expansive, more fully themselves, than they are precisely there. They are
exploring this phenomenon we call consciousness. For one does not dissolve into
sea foam like a mermaid in a fairy tale; rather, one becomes more concentrated,
more fully alive, because the demanding conditions of the sea leave no choice but to
be wholly present. The joy of encountering themselves in this way is so great that the
women dance as they emerge from the sea: scarlet as redfish, their lungs gleaming
like steel and their yellow caps making them blaze like beacons.
The sand on the beach yields softly beneath their feet, supporting them even as it
gives way. Then these sea sisters join hands, sealing a pact to be there for one
another. They stand by one another through life’s changes and transformations,
drawing strength from their shared practice of sea swimming. Life seasons us, and
perhaps swimming in the sea gives them greater strength to weather its storms.
The mara—an Icelandic word for whatever burdens or weighs upon us at any given
time—grows lighter in the sea. The mar—an Icelandic word for ocean—weeps with
us. The sea receives the salty tears that dwell within us, and pearl-sized spaces
open up for something new. For beauty. For joy.
The women are beautiful just as they are, for in the ocean, the distinction between
bodies that conform to conventional ideals of beauty and those that do not simply
dissolves. They thank their bodies for carrying them out into waters whose depths
echo their own. All life on Earth, after all, first emerged in water. Perhaps the sea
swimmers think or sense something like this:
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, body, for always standing by me. Forgive me for
not recognising that you have always wanted me to be well. You have taught me that
I can endure more than I thought I was capable of. I will return here. We are
weathering the sea together—I, we, this community of ours, the Earth, and the
universe.”
Text by: Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir is a sea swimmer and philosopher who thinks with the ocean.