Ripples

Voices. Waves. Water. And echoes. My own voice, echoeing through the cool depths of space, swimming across space from a sunny Earth many swings back, back to now, where the Earth twirls its way around the solar fire, flinging the silver moon around it on its way, like a boy kicking a stone on his way home from school.
Swimming, and space, is a place for elegance, dancing, slow motion, and slow motion sickness.
My voice echoed sickly back to me, saying, plaintiff, "I don't feel anything. I hold you, and I can't feel that you love me, or any of the things you say. I know in my head what you are saying, but I can't feel it."
And then I stuffed the towel into my daypack, jumped on my bike the way some vault over gates, and raced to the pool for training.
There is such power in those moments, that seem so basic, and yet something goes into them, an injection, a surge of power, so that they visit us thousands of days later, still fresh with their original emotion and electric gold energy.

The laps in the pool, where these thoughts of the day unwind or are hardwired back, deeper into the brain tissue - it happens here.
A simple space, this simple body of water. Water seems simple enough. At our beck and call, when we grip a lever and it flows onto egg yoked dishes, or through the syruppy sludge of a coffee cup. Have we tamed a single element of the universe, yes, water?

The silver tap bulges, splits apart, melts, with the fury of a bursting artery, when banks of water are shipped in tankers through the sky and dropped on some frail, crushed land. The silky purr of foam on shore is a mere whisper of the hurricane shriek of the tsunami, black with debris, and death. The flat flat sea, so balmy, so beautiful, so blase, not quite so romantic when its carpet rips, unfurls, by the giant giant wind, building Everests of pyramids, turning silk to icy fire. In all things, in the elements, resides great power and might. Even in the whorls of our ears, the tips of our fingers, the simple strength to annihilate or soothe and caress.

That day, when I felt so little, when teenage angst spoke clearly of the insanity that floats like a miasma over the suburbs...that day I dived in the clear water, wanting to forgot the dizziness, wanting to swim through it.
But it ripples back, like every other intelligent string floating through the universe. It ripples back to be seen and heard for what it is. It ripples back, it ripples back, a giant cavern of power to get our attention, ourselves in motion, with it.