By Paul Kalas
The Galactic Night Swim does not take place at a specific location. It’s a concept; a surreal experience, more than a place. In this swim, we will contemplate the nature of reality, our place in the universe, the eternal questions about consciousness and the spiritual, and our relationship to all living things. Who knew that a swim could do all that for you?
The key is that we will be swimming in near total darkness, yet our senses will be astonished by pinpoints of light shining from the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy above and the thousands of phosphorescent plankton in the water below. The weightlessness and warmth provided by the sea will diminish our attention to our body and free our mind to explore whatever themes it chooses to explore. Years later, we will remember the Galactic Night Swim as a place and time that recharged our soul.
In the northern hemisphere during the summer, the billions of stars in our Galaxy look like a luminescent, patchy cloud stretching upwards from the southern horizon where you will find the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. The darker and clearer the skies, the more these billions of stars will “pop” out of the darkness. In fact, the skies of southern Crete are so dark and clear that many people genuinely think that the light from the Galaxy is a cloud in the sky rather than billions of stars at unimaginable distances away from us.
The center of our Galaxy is in Sagittarius, a constellation that represents a half-man, half-horse centaur holding a bow and arrow. To most people it simply looks like a tea kettle. A curved line of stars to the right of Sagittarius makes up the tail and stinger of the constellation Scorpius, the scorpion. The brightest star in Scorpius located at the head of the scorpion is named Antares, or “opponent of Ares.” Ares is the Greek word for Mars. Both Antares and Ares have a reddish hue, but for different reasons. Ares (Mars) is a nearby planet in our solar system with a solid surface that is composed of reddish dirt. Antares is a very distant red supergiant star burning its last remaining gas, which will culminate in a spectacular explosion that astronomers call a supernova. In the meantime, it’s amazing to ponder that when you look towards Sagittarius, you are gazing at the center of our Galaxy which contains a black hole—one of the most incredible phenomena in nature—though we cannot see it directly. The fabric of spacetime surrounding a black hole is so distorted that light can never escape and time itself appears to have no meaning.
As a night swimmer, the heavens will follow you as you dive into the water and thousands of blue-white stars flash in front of your hands and arms. These are bioluminescent plankton that need to be physically disturbed in order to glow. That’s why you will see them appear, each for a split second, around your moving arms and legs. The ancient text De Mundo (Περὶ Κόσμου) that was attributed to Aristotle stated, “there are exhalations of fire from the sea” (γίνεται πυρὸς ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ), and this could have been an observation of this very same marine bioluminescence. These plankton are probably dinoflagellates, which marine biologists refer to as “dinos.” Thus, you can tell your friends that you swam with the dinos at night.
While stars create light from the energy of fusing atoms, living organisms manage to do it through biochemistry. How does a dino’s flash of light help it? Given that plankton are food for predators, when the food suddenly flashes, this may disturb the predator, or reveal the location of the predator so that it is quickly eaten by yet another predator. It’s as if every time a human pulled a carrot out of the ground we received an electric shock, or the carrot communicated to an alien civilization in space that the human should be immediately vaporized. We would definitely stop touching the carrots!
Though plankton shine in the darkness like stars, they wander the seas like planets. Looking up, the ancient Greeks noticed points of light that seemed to move from night to night relative to the other fixed stars. These were named planets because this word means “wanderer.” It would take many centuries of scientific inquiry to understand that these planets are very close to Earth, orbiting the Sun, whereas the stars are located at great distances, orbiting the galactic center in Sagittarius. This means that the motion of a planet in the sky can be perceived to move over many nights, while the stars appear to have the same position year after year. Looking down instead of up, the German medical doctor and zoologist Victor Hensen rigorously studied small marine organisms. In 1887 he decided to call them “plankton” because they did not have the means to propel themselves in water. This “floating stuff” wanders the Earth’s globe, just like the planets wander the celestial globe.
To get the most out of the Galactic Night Swim, the main ingredient is to swim under very dark conditions. The darker the environment, the brighter and more numerous these flashes will seem to be. The experience can still be pleasant if you are swimming near lights and with the moon in the sky. But if you are away from the major cities and the moon is NOT in the sky, everything above and below the water will seem much more vibrant and astonishing. The flashes may be more numerous several hours after sunset because bioluminescence follows a circadian rhythm that has peak activity around the middle of the night.
Even non-swimmers can wade out to knee-deep water to enjoy the bioluminescent plankton just by waving their hands vigorously underwater. But the real treat is to take shallow dives with a breaststroke or a sculling motion of your hands and witness the bioluminescence in front of your very eyes! Then come to the surface and float on your back, gazing south toward the Galaxy. Next, dip your head back in the water and look back at your feet as you kick underwater to produce fleeting marine constellations of light. This won’t be a long or cardiovascular-workout swim. Consider it more of a playful, splashing around for 10–15 minutes type of swim. No matter how you choose to enjoy it, the Galactic Night Swim is sure to become a treasured memory.
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
I think the creative process is needed and impactful because it offers people new ways to view and connect with the world around them. The Galactic Night Swim brings people to an environment they may never have experienced before: entering water in near total darkness. Faced with such a void, we might turn inward and feel alone, yet the opposite happens unexpectedly and simultaneously. The universe that we we live in is revealed to be alive with energy everywhere we look on both the grandest scales and the microscopic. The subsequent spawning of novel thoughts and powerful feelings from elements that were always there but never before combined is what attracts people so strongly to The Creative Process.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
One wouldn’t think that the night sky, which is everything above us, could be lost, but over time it has been veiled by the bright lights of huge cities. There is a great scene in the 1991 film “Black Robe” set in the 1600’s where a European missionary in the Canadian wilderness becomes lost in a forest. When the native people finally find him they are astonished: ‘How could you get lost?’ They can clearly see the unique details of the forest and perceive their exact location, while the Europeans had completely lost that form of perception. So too it is astonishing that many millions of people in the modern world have never seen a night sky full of stars, while our ancestors knew all the celestial patterns which they associated with their life experiences, such as the beginning of spring or harvest time. I have tried to guide people back to the stars by organizing "star parties" in my local community, but also in the way I wrote my swimming guidebook “Crete Swim”. I made it the only book on swimming that features the night sky on the cover, and then filled it with recommendations on where to swim by moonlight or purely by starlight as with the Galactic Night Swim. I hope that my creative work will reconnect readers to the night sky so that they might discover a renewed sense of direction and their unique place in the world.
