I am fortunate these days to find myself in a place where I can swim every day. I will head offshore about 250 yards and then paddle along, parallel to the beach for a quarter mile, before returning to where I started. Tucked inside the Mayan Reef, the shallow turquoise waters in this part of the world are usually safe from sharks and jellyfish and the waves are calmer, making swimming easier on this old body.
We are of the oceans, you and I. Floating in the sea, gazing up into a blue sky, I return to humanity’s womb. Indeed, the amniotic fluid I “breathed” for my first nine months in 1946 was about 2% salinity, about a third less than the ocean’s.
While we speak reverently of Madre Tierra and Terra Firma, all life depends on water; the élan vital, the universal solvent, aqua mater. Our mythology is full of these stories of great deliverance — the raising of Mount Ararat out of floodwaters to heel Noahs Ark, the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, George Freeth’s heroic rescue of 11 fishermen caught in a gale off Venice Pier in 1908. In a small fishing village in Japan, they still light candles to remember that deliverance and rebirth.
George Freeth
In Evolutionary Water: Wombs, Seas, Tears and their Utraquistic Relation, Shè Hawke writes that this is why the catastrophe of birth and expulsion from the ocean are a connected theme — our ancestors began in aquatic environments and, like salamanders or mosquitoes, passed from something like gill-breathing to air breathing. When animals emerged from the ocean to live on land, they needed lungs — to take oxygen into their blood and exhale the wastes of cellular metabolism. Lungs function to charge the blood so that vital oxygen and just the right trace of nitrogen can reach all other body cells.
Land-dwellers also needed a colon to retain and conserve internal body fluids by removing excess water from digestive wastes. Our marine skin needed to adapt to shield the body from stronger solar radiation, especially ultraviolet, and to better regulate heat, using hair follicles and sweat glands.
