Swimming with John O’Donohue

Touch Here to Support Me

Low tide gathers at my ankles as I look across the bay to Provincetown. That’s when I notice the late, great Irish poet-theologian John O’Donohue treading water just beyond the seam where the ocean turns from blue to black. I know that John knows I’ve never been fearful of dark water. I like the mystery.

He lifts an arm, calling me out.

Meeting his light-body in this way seems the most natural thing. I was raised on the idea that the dead drift upward, into some vaguely rendered heaven. Now I know that if anything endures, it dissolves back into the elements—light refracting on a wave, salt drying on skin, a voice returning in the surf. Nothing lost. Just returned to motion.

“John,” I shout, salt on my lips, “I’m not looking for atonement.” My voice carries strangely across the water. He doesn’t answer, only treads in place—calm as a monk who has already heard the confession beneath the protest.

My resistance is predictable as the tide charts. He shows up precisely when I’d prefer someone less attuned to the things I’d rather not discuss. But John has the patience of geology.

So I swim out.

Each lift of water raises me without effort, each trough opens its hollow and receives me. Behind me on the blanket, a sandy, dog-eared copy of Four Elements lies open to “The Ocean As Immense Divinity,” its pages splayed in the sun.

We’re in the Atlantic, of course. The ocean John loved in Ireland and I love on Cape Cod—one continuous body, the same lineage of tides shaping different continents, sculpting us in parallel.

When I reach him, he glances at me sidelong with a wry grin, the particular sort that says: You already know what I’m going to say.

“Even a single drop of water,” he murmurs, “given enough time, can carve its way through stone.” He’s watched the slow erosion of my defenses—channels carved through me by way of marriage, motherhood, illness, desire, midlife, return. Channels now open to flow.

I tell John I came this morning for a kind of elemental intimacy that doesn’t require confession, only skin. He laughs and reminds me that water has no intimacy. That’s why sailors navigate by the coastline or the stars. The ocean itself never offers a fixed location. Water has no “where.”

A warm current brushes my thighs—here, then already gone. A thought dissolved before I can name it.

I dive under. The world stills. Sound folds inward.

I touch the sandy bottom of an original silence. Down here, everything slows to the rhythm of the first body—the single cell before it split, before the world multiplied into its relentless complexity. There’s a pull to stay longer, to surrender to what John calls the ocean’s terrible grammar of promise and threat.

I think of the hydrothermal vents—those impossible fissures so deep the pressure folds metal like paper. Places where almost nothing survives, yet somehow life persists, fed not by sunlight but by the Earth’s chemical exhale. Life forming in blackness. I imagine diving so far down into the planet that down becomes up, that I rise out of the Earth’s core and surface, impossibly, in outer space. The direction of transformation is usually opposite what we assume.

When I come up for air, the horizon looks ordinary, but the tide has already reversed. John says, as though he were merely naming what has been hiding in plain sight, that water’s mutability makes it a hospitable metaphor for change. I’m not so sure. It seems to me the ocean just keeps doing what it does, and the rest of us shape ourselves around its insistence.

And then, without warning, John is gone—or everywhere. Hard to tell.

—

I love you.

Juliette

Touch Here To Support Me