Aquapoetics

A water poem by W.B. Yeats

People often say they 'see' or feel like a dolphin while they are receiving aquatic bodywork.

Here is the middle section of a three-part poem by W.B. Yeats.  It immediately made me think of the wounds, ancestral patterns, and love that can all be part of the 'sweet and strange' experience of an aquatic bodywork session. 

News from the Delphic Oracle (1939) by WB Yeats

II

Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again,
The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins plunge
Until in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proferring it's sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.

From William Butler Yeats: Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M.L. Rosenthal, 4th edn, Scribner, 1996

Aquatic healing arts in the blogosphere

Art washes away from the Soul the dust of Everyday Life.
Pablo Picasso

This second aquatic therapy blog carnival (see the first here) celebrates the art of healing and the healing in art, and the way water flows between these for the people profiled here.  Inger says, for example: 'Art for me is healing and like a gift that reverberates, like water'.

The word 'therapy' doesn't capture the playful inspiration behind what many aquatic bodyworkers do in the water.  For me, this skill has always seemed more an art form than anything else.  You can see art reflected in the websites of many independent aquatic practitioners too (a post on some of these coming soon).

Just as a spoonful of honey makes the medicine go down, conveying this sense of art when you are doing therapy in the water may make the experience even more accessible and effective.  And, for the receiver, expressing the experience through art can help capture something otherwise difficult to articulate.

Water and creativity

In February, I created a group on the Aquatic Therapist network called Water and Creativity - 'for exploring creative ideas in the water for their own sake ... many of which have great healing potential'.  Several members of the network are also professional artists and I wanted to set up a place to explore this crossover.

I'd love to see more aquatic bodyworkers blogging about their art - blogs can be a combination of words and images with the emphasis on either or both.  The above network includes a blog for each member but few people use it to express their creativity. I hope this post will help inspire that.