Water. It is as much a part of summer as long, hot days. The warm smell of it from the backyard garden hose. The salty massage of it in an ocean tide. The crisp splash of it from a running jump in the pool.

Just being around water is soothing. Fishermen don't consider the trip to the lake wasted if they don't catch anything. Gazing at it from the shore is, ah, sublime.

It quenches our thirst; our summer cups runneth over.

So what is it about water that is so necessary to us? Why do we crave to be simply in its presence, especially in summer?

Since we are composed mostly of water, there may be some biological imperative that draws us to water as the sun beats down and begins to dry up who we are. The presence of water may reassure us at a cellular level that we will continue to survive.

But there's something that is important to the psyche as well.

Beneath the Surface

In Jungian psychology, water is a symbol of the unconscious. Dreams of a flooded basement can be interpreted as the dreamer's refusal or inability to deal adequately with unconscious feelings and thoughts.

Drowning dreams may represent a sense of drowning in unexpressed emotions.

Swimming skillfully across the ocean can mean the dreamer feels capable of navigating the emotional tasks at hand.

Dirty water, shallow water, muddy water, or water running dry all are potentially revealing dream symbols.

Water is as much a part of our inner landscape as the fountains, lakes and oceans are of our outer world.

Being Present

The "ancient mariner," Coleridge's mythic figure, was way ahead of his time in demonstrating the psychological (and physical) power and pull of the sea.

Desolate, he found himself watching the water snakes "coiling, writhing and gleaming around his becalmed ship." And out of some deep part of his unconscious he found himself blessing them. "A spring of love gusht from my heart/And I bless'd them unaware."

"Since we are composed mostly of water, there may be some biological imperative that draws us to water as the sun beats down and begins to dry up who we are."

It was a defining moment, a redeeming one, and, as Karen Armstrong wrote in a book on her own climb out of darkness, it was a moment of "spontaneous ecstasy that took him out of himself and toward his fellow creatures..And immediately the albatross hanging around his neck like a millstone, the cause of all his misery, 'fell off and sank/Like lead into the sea'" ( The Spiral Staircase, pp. 264-265).

So we flock in August to the seashore, to the mountain rivers, but not just to escape the heat and have that last end-of-summer change of scenery. There is a profound trophic nurturing that nature offers us in water and on peaks. If we stop and sit in silence, our busy beta brain waves meld into alpha and even theta. Our heart rate variability finds a peaceful coherence, and our autonomic nervous system comes into balance. All of which means we reduce the level of stress chemicals coursing through our bodies, giving our immune systems and the internal lining of our coronary arteries some relief from risk of damage.

And all we have to do is be present.

But being present is harder than it sounds. It means that while we are sitting in nature's sanctuary, we are truly attuned to the sounds of waves and wind and, in that solitude, we move out of ourselves as the mariner did, "blessed them unaware."

It isn't easy. It means turning off not only the cell phone but also the internal chatter in our heads. It means stilling the constant planning and agitating over what we will do next week or what we forgot to do last week. It means to quiet ourselves whenever we are so busy that the trophic power and pull of the sea, of mountains or meadows is irrelevant to all but the poets who feel it and scientists who study it.

Perfect Storm

Isabella Bird was a sickly Victorian lady who lived in chronic pain after failed back surgery that further contributed to her constant agony. She is our favorite mountain woman and daring adventurer on the high seas. She climbed the magnificient Long's Peak in the Colorado Rockies long before park rangers painted big bull's eye targets on boulders to guide fog-bound hikers toward surer footing down their 14,000-foot descents.

Isabella Bird had been classified as an invalid by her Edinburg physicians. She hung topside on the rails of sailing vessels in fierce storms and said, "I love it." In all of this, she moored to something outside herself that was so big and strong that she forgot her pain.

From Long's Peak, she went to Tibet and climbed the Himalayas. After her death in 1904, the editors of the Edinburgh Medical Journal tried to explain how this "invalid" could do so much. They could only conclude that she was that rare person who could not only become present to nature but be so captured by it that she transcended even pain.

Robert Frost, in his poetic wisdom, said that "the best thing that we're put here for's to see." By seeing, he meant not only with the eyes of our heads but also with our heart and soul. It we are successful, we will have engaged the mariner's unconscious, and our own. And even without a millstone of misery to drop away, we will feel lighter, if not wetter.

UPDATED: 8-09-2004

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