Crave Like Water
I go for walks these days. I walk with intentionality, cracking the day’s time, suspending the tasks I absolutely must do with the insertion of departures–out the door I go. I heighten my awareness during these thirty-to-sixty-minute outings. Here, to the right, rounding the bend, roots of thick-trunked evergreens buckle the narrow path, and up ahead, on the other side of the rural corner I cross, the planked, tiny, kempt museum drops behind the mulch and ferns. My walks are life-giving, a layering of nourishment, feeding muscles and bones, mind and memory, and something else, too. Something cellular. I think the nourishment might be–now that I’ve lived here for twenty years–labeled “home.” I am fed home as I walk the same route over and over. “I’m going for my walk.” It is my walk. My walk feeds my state of being.
On the weekends, I hope to time my walks to the tide so that I can walk on the shore of the bay. I can’t always make this happen. The weekend before last, the tide was very high due to storms, so I could not walk along the shore, but I did walk out onto the pier. It was early morning and very still. Large seagulls and big crows lined the railings as I approached. I did something I often feel impelled to do when I approach many birds: I lifted my arms high, knowing the birds would follow my lead, and they did. One by one, the birds lifted to the sky. It feels a symbiotic occurrence, even if they are just taking off to avoid me. I like to think they believe that I, too, have wings.
Once past the flown birds at the lookout, I peered directly below, into the water to see what I might see; to my astonishment, a porpoise swam, surfacing twenty feet in front of me and was joined by two others, all three gifting me with short-finned arcs before swimming away. I gasped and whispered something, wishing them back, never having seen one all these years, and I thanked them for their presence on that winter morning, during one of my solitary life-giving walks, which I have come to crave like water.
In Volume 5, Issue 1 of Club Plum, cravings are found in the rich juxtaposition of collage, in lonely ice-cream shops, in dances on rooftops, in psychiatric hospitals, below yellow streetlights, in familiar laundromats, in green paintings, in dance clubs, in the hands of our beloveds and also in their absence.
Please step inside our winter issue and keep us warm.
Yours in words and art,
Thea
# Club Plum Literary Journal #ClubPlum #Club Plum Literary Journal #ClubPlum
Thea Swanson View All →
Thea Swanson is a feminist atheist who holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She is the Founding Editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, and her poetry, fiction, essays and reviews are published in places such as World Literature Today, Mid-American Review and Northwest Review.
You always make me want to move to western Washington!
LikeLiked by 1 person