Swimmer's soul and the Emperor's New Swim Trunks

Walnut Creek, California

"Where is the rest of me?"
    This is a question I like to ask myself, to check what aspects of my energy and identity may be lacking at a given time in my life, and which are abundantly present. It's a question I often ask people to journey on in my soul recovery workshops. What comes up often guides them - and me - to a younger self, or a greater self, or a parallel self, or a creative or animal spirit that we can now seek to lure back into our lives to provide more juice and more joy,
   It was no surprise to notice, recently, that the swimmer in me has been disaffected, because I have not been making enough time to get myself in the water where my body loves to be. I need my swimmer with me, because he can really go the distance. I can still swim 3 miles without pausing, doing the kind of freestyle we called the Australian crawl when I was a boy, staying very close to the water, minimizing resistance, turning the head no more than is necessary to take in air, loving the water and streaming with it. The poet William Stafford wrote a pretty good essay titled "Writing the Australian Crawl" and I most enjoy writing when it is like this way of moving with the element of water, which I have always known to be my primary element.
   So this morning, staying in a pleasant place in Walnut Creek CA where there are two pools bordered by palms, I got up early to swim. I was amazed and dismayed to find that I had not packed my swim trunks. I went through my suitcase three times. This was incomprehensible. I had taken my swim trunks everywhere all year long, to many, many places where I did not have the chance to swim or failed to make that happen - to Frankfurt and Barcelona, to Wisconsin and Lithuania, to Seattle and Ann Arbor. How could I have left my swim trunks at home, coming to sunny California?
    No worries. I had a pair of ocean-blue boxers that might pass for swim trunks if not inspected too closely by others. They even had a button in a strategic place to stop me flapping around, visibly, getting in or out of the pool.
    I chose the smaller and quieter of the two pools and swam for an hour before other people appeared in the enclosure. I stretched out on a recliner to catch some California sun. The pool lady moved closer and closer, hosing plants along the edges of the pool area. I noticed, to my horror, that I had failed to button my boxers at that strategic point. Any move to close the gap now might merely succeed in drawing attention to my aberrant swimwear.
    What to do? I chose the Emperor's New Swim Trunks approach, willing that nobody should notice there was anything amiss, not the lady with the toy dog who now appeared, not the building janitor, not the pool lady with the menacing hose. In due course, I wrapped a towel around my middle and made a dignified exit. I did not miss the metaphor. My missing swim trunks flagged the fact that I let a rather important soul part - that swimmer in me - go missing for far too long. Action plan: buy a new swim suit today so I don't have to cringe or clutch myself when getting my swimmer back into the water.

Huntsman's coat in the water

I plunge into the waters of the lake and swim with delight. After a while I see something red on the lake floor. Curious, I dive down to check it out. I find a beautifully tailored huntsman's coat, the kind the English call a "pink" coat but is actually bright crimson. It is streaming with the water, apparently suspended a little off the bottom.

I am thrilled with excitement and a kind of fierce joy. I know that this is a sign from the great Huntsman, Death, announcing his nearness and allowing time to get everything together in order to meet him and depart the ordinary world well. When he appears in his own coat, it will be time to go. I remember (becoming conscious inside the dream) earlier dreams and dream reentries in which I discovered and revisited a classy pub named the Huntsman's Arms, located just on the other side of mortal life.

I surface from this dream as if swimming up from the depths of the lake. My feelings, as in the dreams, are excitement and fierce joy.

I reflect that I've felt an intimacy with Death for much of my life, and have encountered a personal Death in many guises.

In an earlier dream from last night I was called to be present at the death of an elderly society lady otherwise unknown to me. I seemed to be cast in the role of a gentle death messenger, a Huntsman's assistant. Seeing the fear of imminent deatb in her eyes, I grazed her lips softly with a dry kiss, like the brush of a butterfly's wing. Then she passed on to her new life journey.

Yeats spoke of Death as a Huntsman, even on his gravestone. The scene of the Huntsman's Arms that I remembered in last night's dream of the hunter's red coat is one that has become strongly planted in my imaginal geography. The wall paintings in the tap room - where I have found friends who have passed on, and their friends, engaged in genial and philosophical banter - are not the typical hunt country prints in which the fox is the quarry. A portrait that may be an image of the Huntsman himself shows an immaculately tailored figure with the head of a red fox.

I don't know whether the red coat in the water is one I am meant to wear myself, or the garment of the one who will come to take me, at the appointed time.

My philosophy is to try to make sure that any day is "a good day to die".

A natural death in water is something I've contemplated, especially when I have asked groups - in my fierce and beautiful workshops on "Making Death Your Ally" - to imagine themselves at the moment of physical death - with Death a palpable presence. I'm currently on vacation in the Champlain Islands of Vermont, swimming a few miles every day in the lake. But the water is choppy this morning. So instead of heading straight for the water, I have lingered in an Adirondack chair to write of the Huntsman. This may of course be the Huntsman's effect on the day.