Mekdela Maskal is a media activist, researcher, artist of many incarnations and long time Nu Swim muse. Born in Northern California and living in New York for the last decade, during isolation Mekdela made the decision to relocate to the place she called home as a child. While driving across the country back to California, Mekdela spent time considering isolation during Covid 19, her changing relationship with her body, the deep connection she feels to water and adapting to new, yet familiar land, in an eloquent essay and accompanying transcendent video footage. Mekdela’s thoughtful musings remind us to slow down, breath, and continue to educate ourselves, now and forever. We asked Mekdela to use our platform as she wished – watch Mekdela's film 'like water' she constructed for us on her journey back west, look through her beautiful images and read her words and interview below.

I started to write and think about this when we had been social distancing in New York City for about two months and I was going through a journey of being in a transformed relationship with my body through isolation. Coronavirus was making me attend to my ideas about my social self and our responsibility for collective health while also learning about my own womb and hormonal health issues. I was taking baths everyday and jumping in the ocean or upstate rivers as much as possible. 

I thought about how water has always been a sense of comfort for me. How I have no water in my chart. How expelling water through tears is the most satisfying relief. How being submerged in water feels like the ultimate hug. How I always seek out bodies of water. How we are bodies of water. And, how waves make me want to dance. 

A couple weeks later I was healing from an emergency surgery and feeling weak and disconnected -- sprinting between rage and numbness about black death and the spectacle that follows. I’m a very thoughtful and expressive person, and I usually find catharsis and reflection in sharing and connecting with views online. But, over the past few months that’s been changing. The evil that’s built into -- and manifests from -- the platforms we rely on for sharing feels ever present. 

I’ve found myself yearning for the feeling I get when I’m in water, of being consumed by quiet, yet even more aware. In How to Disappear Akiko Busch explains research by Elizabeth Straughan that describes the relationship between breathing, buoyancy and emotion. “Above the surface...attentiveness to slow measured, and continuous breathing is generally practiced in meditation, but underwater this connection between breathing motion and placement is even more intrinsic.” Straughan suggests that texture, depth and relative silence of water can revise our psychological state and “mobilize emotion”. I too find a surge of clarifying emotion and healing in water -- in swimming, watching and listening to her. 

Busch goes on to say how it’s not only our sense of space, weight and substance that is under revision in water, but our humanity. My yearning for the movement, structurelessness, and comfort of water has been reflecting my desire to vanish -- to have less visibility and be more unseen -- but still feel held. I’m always learning from my relationship with nature, and water has been teaching me a lot these days, making me reckon with my internal conflicts. 

I’m now in Nisenan land near the Yuba river in California. I moved here a few weeks ago and am getting rerooted in the environment and deepening my relationship with land. I asked my dad why he built a home here and he said “because of  the lakes”.  I love them too.  

There’s a stream at the bottom of a hill I live on and when I’m feeling detached or overwhelmed I tune into her sound. I didn’t have a shower for a couple weeks so I bathed in her too and remembered how much more of her there was when I was younger. I think that’s why I adore all seasons. I want the land here to rest in the winter and receive snow so that we can have a spring of growth and a summer without drought. I work in climate change news so I think about this often, especially the words we use to describe the non-human. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer said, “a bay is a noun only if water is dead” in Braiding Sweetgrass. She describes how a bay is a verb in indigenous Potawatomi language, “To be a bay releases the water from bondage and lets it live…the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with the cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could so otherwise -- become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.” Language as a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world. Water helps me understand love in multitudes. 

“‘What were you before you met me?’
‘I think I was drowning’
A pause. 
‘And what are you now?’ he whispered, sinking.
I thought for a second. ‘Water’”
-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous