Three stories from the water

I was maybe four or five. The instructor reached toward me with soft hands and I screamed. Not because she was unkind. Because the water behind her looked like it had no bottom.

While I trembled at the edge, other children were climbing the diving board and throwing themselves into the deep end — laughing, weightless, completely unafraid. I watched them and felt two things at once: terror, and a longing so sharp it hurt.

I didn’t know then that longing is often the first sign of destiny.

The fear wasn’t just physical. It felt older than my childhood, older than memory. I had dreams of drowning before I ever entered deep water. I’d wake up gasping, heart racing, reaching for the surface of something I couldn’t name.

It took me twenty years to understand what the water was doing. It wasn’t threatening me. It was asking me something — the same question, in every pool and river and dream:

The fear and the calling were never separate. They were the same thing, looked at from different sides. I am still learning this. I am still in the classroom.

I was sixteen. The signs along the highway said: This water is stronger than it looks. I didn’t understand what that meant.

The river swallowed me instantly — cold, merciless, spinning. My feet couldn’t find the bottom. My scream didn’t reach the sky. Somehow, my body knew where to go. I clawed back to the rocks, dragging myself out. Shaking. Bleeding. Alive.

I climbed toward the hot springs higher on the ridge. When I reached them, steam was rising — gentle, patient, the complete opposite of the river that had tried to take me. I stepped in not to relax but to survive. To wash the terror off. To pour heat into the places where fear had frozen.

I cupped the warm water in my hands and let it spill over my face, my throat, my chest. And something shifted.

There are two kinds of water — the kind that tests you, and the kind that receives you. We need both. The test shows us what we’re made of. The receiving reminds us why it was worth surviving.

My former husband tilted his head toward the water and said quietly: “You know this stuff’s dead, right?”

Dead. The word landed somewhere I didn’t have language for yet. A truth I had felt but never named.

I had spent years moving through wild water — hot springs, rivers, oceans — that had rearranged me. But I had also taught water aerobics, watched people with arthritis laugh again, watched people recovering from surgery find freedom in their joints. That water wasn’t wild. But it held people when nothing else could.

So I sat there with both truths inside me: pool water can heal the body. Living water can heal the soul.

And then the deeper question arrived, the one I’ve been sitting with ever since:

The living parts of us — the wild, the uncertain, the unfinished, the honest — those are the parts that heal other people. The chlorinated version is safer. But it can’t make anyone feel less alone.