“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” — John Burroughs
Today, on the water, I understood exactly what Burroughs meant. Winter and the week had tested my stress levels. I badly needed a kayak beneath the blueness the sky was offering. As I paddled, the noise began to fall away. Nothing was solved in the conventional sense. Instead, my senses returned to their proper order.
I have also been reading Wallace J. Nichols’ Blue Mind: How Water Makes You Happier, More Connected and Better at What You Do. Nichols describes our emotional, cognitive and physical relationship with water: the way being near, in or on it can quiet mental overload, restore attention and strengthen our connection with ourselves, other people and the natural world.
Research supports the direction of that thinking. A study across 18 countries found that frequent recreational visits to green, inland-blue and coastal-blue spaces were associated with greater wellbeing and lower mental distress. Reviews of “blue care” interventions also suggest benefits for mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, although the evidence varies.
Several pathways meet at the water’s edge. Blue spaces invite movement and create distance from everyday demands. Their light, sound and changing patterns hold attention without requiring us to force it. They can open a feeling of connection—to place, memory and something larger than the immediate self.
There are rare moments when what we are feeling, what we are reading and what the physical world presents to us form a wonderful symmetry. Evidence of such a moment leapt out at me when I returned to the studio.
In Blue Mood, the vast blue plane carries traces of motion like submerged gestures. A white horizontal band steadies the composition. Below it, the living surface of the harbour continues to shift. The photograph does not illustrate Nichols’ book. It records my own encounter with the principle at its heart: water can change the quality of our attention.
For me, Blue Mood is the visual summary of that morning—the moment the water put my senses back in order.
