Yesterday, 10 October 2020, was World Mental Health Day. Depression and anxiety are terrible bedfellows. They haunt you, perturb you, rarely leave you in peace, and hang over your head like a veil of despair tinging with darkness the brightest of days. On the surface, one can appear okay but the storm within may rage darkly, sadly, i...
As I've entered the world of swimming, as in any discipline, I've discovered the worlds within worlds. One of the major distinctions is pool vs. wild or outdoor swimming. Sara Solnick, a lifelong pool swimmer from the UK, shares her moving story of transformation from fear to flow in the sea and how she has also become ...
Ángela Lavilla Cañedo's moving Wild Swimmer Story explores how wild cold water and embracing her wildish nature have saved her in body and mind during some challenging years. Embracing our wildish nature means to awaken our inner worlds, live life and our creativity fully, reject confining social norms that stigmatize ...
Today's powerful Wild Swimmer Story is a woman's discovery of herself, her worth and her decision to live. Many women (too many) allow fears, habits and hang-ups to keep them from embracing what their souls yearn for and need, ignoring what instinct and inner wisdom shouts at them to do. B...
It's hard to imagine nature mirroring more profoundly a common mental, inner process than this morning's walk and swim in the sea. Who doesn't experience 'mental fog' from time to time, ie, a lack of clarity, vision or feel overwhelmed by doubt? This sequence of four photos focused on the same view show my descent into the fog....
Swimming at dawn started many days ago, from need. It started from restriction. It started because I felt I must do something, something to keep myself alive when the world around me seemed to be going crazy. I must go to the one place, outside my front door, that resonates life, bounty, mystery, joy, fear, passion - the sea. I must greet it each d...
Swimming at dawn also signifies for me swimming towards the light, ie, towards discovery, inner understanding as well as simply being, experiencing joy and living in the moment. At the same time there is an implicit swimming away from something - the dark, the night, the doubt, the hidden, unclear parts of th...
The idea of La belle sauvage or the wild beauty came to me as I looked at my footprints disappearing into the tide pool. Then the words, "....and then she was gone" came into my mind. And, "Where does she go?" Like my footprints, creative ideas emerged from within tiptoeing out into my watery magical world where I have found such joy...
