Skaill & Marwick

Bay of Skaill

Sunshine and jellyfish, ease and danger! I swam along the shore dodging the occasional jellyfish, till I came across a raft of them and gave up.

I tried Marwick bay where the incoming tide created perfect body-surfing waves, only to find myself planing over more jellyfish, with no control over speed and direction. So I lay on a warm slab of slate, wondering about water.

The word 'baptism' comes from the Greek for 'dip, plunge, immerse', and it's no coincidence that full-body immersion should have been used in order to ritualise cleansing and spiritual rebirth. Even a casual dip makes one feel renewed, jellyfish notwithstanding.

Norman MacCaig captures the feeling in his poem Praise of a Boat.
    Boat of no dreams, you open spaces
    The mind can't think of till it's in them.
    Where the works is easy and dangerous and
    Who can distinguish saints and sinners?

Replace the word 'boat' with 'dip' and you have it, the sense of awed (self) discovery, liminality and  levelling humility!

Marwick Bay