Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming...

Sunday night I did something more liberating than NOS-ing. For those of you that are not aware, NOS-ing stands for naked ocean swim-ming, and it’s amazing, but it’s more of a cherry to the grape of Sunday night—swimming with all your clothes on.

Call me crazy, but Maria and I jumped in Carl’s pool after everyone left (including Carl) and in the immortal words of Ms. Rhodes, “I feel like a kid again.” Now I, personally, cannot take any credit for this late-night excursion because it was entirely Maria’s idea, and I was just along for the ride. However, I have not held someone’s hand, counted to three and leapt in a pool while trying to muffle my own high-pitched voice for fear of waking the neighbors since I was maybe 5.

And, might I add, there is nothing that can make you feel more like a mermaid than kicking around in a body of water with a dress on, the cloth floating and clinging and floating again. Even better—waddling down the sidewalk in the dark as you drip in all of the neighbors’ plants. I don’t think I even wrung out my hair once.

And, ladies and gentlemen, the piece de resistance. As I peeled off layers of wet fabric in the bathtub at home, what should fall to the ground but the $13 that I had folded up and shoved down my shirt when I didn’t have pockets earlier in the day? This, by the way, totally beats what I used to do to find money at age 5 by a long shot—digging through the change in my dad’s pockets. This time, I even got to keep some!

Aroma

A really sweet lady came into our office today asking to use the phone, and pretty soon her personal scent began to permeate the room. By the time she left, you could sense her olfactory essence from another room, and I just imagined the fragrance visibly wafting through the air in loops and curly-q’s as it spread its presence under windows and door frames until the entire world could smell her coming.

Every few moments I get a whiff of something that reminds me of her again, and I think I smell her coming, but it’s only my nose playing tricks on me.

It makes me wonder. What did Jesus smell like?

Today I needed...

Sometimes I do things solely because I must be reminded that my life serves a higher purpose than simply taking up space, providing fuel for the plants. I need to remember that I am unique in capability and function, and, most of all, that I am not alone in my continued existence as such.

Today I needed to salsa dance. I needed real, live contact with another creating being. I needed someone to show me, once again, that creation can be communal, can be spiritual. That rather than pulling teeth alone, it can be connecting—infusing energy and an awkward poignancy down to the bone.

Some Native American tribes have “sweats” where they strip down to the flesh and dance naked together around a fire as they pour water over it to create steam. They say that each stomp on the ground is an unmitigated offering to the gods. An entirely vulnerable, inarticulate prayer of things only the spirit can express. And they do it together.

Today I needed to be together. Forsaking all duplicity to form into something new. Something unified. Some one. To know that touch is pure communication. To take away all the assumptions, stigmas, presumptions, and theories to just be in a team presence. To move under the guise of drama with the underlying intent of companionship with the air. To contort and swoop and swing and step and look and change and lean on someone else’s signal just as they do mine.

Today I needed to dance.