"The Water Sustains Me Without Even Trying"

This sweet musical rabbit hole for your weekend.

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Mom & brother watching sunset, Waikiki Beach.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

I was driving home from a swim yesterday, the air cold, the sun high, the sky a sharp winter blue, and my nervous system murmuring just under the water line. The world, right?

Instead of radio news, I listened to a Spotify playlist (mine), that surprised me with a song so beautiful, tender, and exquisite that my entire mind-body system relaxed. Shoulders softened, jaw unclenched, and I shifted from a general numbness to appreciating the leafless tree trunks stretching into the sky, the sun dapples streaking through the evergreen canopies. (That’s the rest beauty gives us.)

I took a photo of the song on my car’s dashboard so I’d remember to re-listen.

The song is “The Water,” written by British musician and actor Johnny Flynn, and performed with English folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling. Of course, the title caught my attention. At the time, my hair was wet, my skin smelled of chlorine, just how I like it.

Here’s the “The Water” on Spotify, followed by a live YouTube version.

Just two folk musicians sitting in a backyard on a cloudy day, singing like angels.

Synchronicity!*

I already had one leg down the rabbit hole when I discovered something cool:

Johnny Flynn wrote the theme song for one of my all-time favorite TV series, Detectorists. (2014, three seasons). It’s a quirky, strange, curio of a show about a pair of friends obsessed with scouring the surface of their earth to find Roman treasures. Detectorists gets a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the community of characters are 💛💛💛💛. (One of the main characters is Diana Rigg’s daughter, she’s excellent.)

When Steve and I finished the series (exquisite, artful, perfect conclusion), without uttering a word to each other, we went right back to Season 1, episode 1, and started it over.

Here’s Johnny Flynn singing “Detectorists”:

As for the co-singer from The Water, Laura Marling

Staying with the water theme, Marling released an early album called Alas I Cannot Swim, and on it a song called “Crawled Out of the Sea,” not even two minutes and a real jaunty-lovely number:

Because we like to do things in three’s here:

For your third video presentation, here’s a live concert performance of “The Water” from Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit (my family! kidding). Here, Flynn duets with his sister, Lily Flynn (on keyboards), who gets almost zero camera time, which sucks, but it’s fun seeing/hearing a song performed live, so here you go:

*PS. The term “synchronicity*” was coined by Carl Jung. He defined “synchronicity” as meaningful coincidences that can’t be explained by cause and effect; separate events/occurrences that are manifestations of a deeper order in the universe, and share a meaningful connection. I read that as personalized meaning-making from separate events. A kind of ephemeral, magical beauty, perhaps?

Apparently, Jung believed that synchronicity was a healthy function of the mind, but could become harmful in psychosis.

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