Have you ever seen a more contented face? What is it about children and water that mixes together with such ease and delight?

I haven’t been posting lately,since my son and his two-year-old daughter have come to live with us. But I have spent a lot of time in our pool. When we first took our granddaughter swimming two months ago, she fell in love with the water. She was using a floatie then because she couldn’t swim. But now, two months later, she dives in head-first and swims across the pool and back all by herself (no floatie!). She does little twirling, acrobatic tricks that she makes up by herself, and she sings songs while floating on her back.

What she loves most of all is swimming under the water and diving deep to touch the bottom of the pool. She thinks she’s a mermaid–and so do we.

She’s absolutely fearless when she’s in the water, like it’s her natural element. And maybe that’s how it feels to her, so soon from the watery womb where she first swam. The look on her face when she swims is pure bliss–as I captured in the cover photo when she was still using the floatie.

I so relate to that look. I’m not the natural swimmer she is. And I’m far from being fearless in the water. But I spent a great deal of time on and under the ocean when we were sailing around the world. I spent hours every morning snorkeling with my daughter, foraging for food (rock scallops, mostly), while my husband and son went spear fishing. I felt at home in the water then, and I still do when swimming laps in our pool. There’s something about being suspended in that embracing space that feels like heaven on earth.

The passage below captures better than I can that sense of being so at home in the water:

When we swim we shed our higher consciousness, the complex, reasoning human organism, and remember, deep inside ourselves, the first oceanic living cell; we almost become our origins. Whether in lake, ocean, or pool, there comes that moment when the world of our ordinary preoccupations washes away and we sink into a meditative state where the instinctual, intuitive, subconscious mind can tell us what we need to know.

In the world of water, we become aware of our skin, of the body’s limits and definitions, while we are simultaneously wrapped in an element so familiar, so delightful, sensual that we feel we have come home.

—From Splash! Great Writing About Swimming by Laurel Blossom

I’m glad my granddaughter discovered the bliss of swimming early in life. I hope she never loses it.

Other water and swimming-related posts you might enjoy:

The Wildness of Water

Swimming Among the Stars

Water Holes in the Wild and Backyard