I love baths because I’m encased in water.
I love baths because I can sprinkle in eucalyptus and sweet orange essential oil and inhabit my own aromatherapy haven. I love baths because they’re wet and complete and comforting, so much so that on a bad day, I’ve been known to take three baths. On any day when I’m working at home, I might take a bath instead of a coffee break, a bath to wash off the ill effects of an insomniac night, a bath to ponder the impossible or plan a way out of some relational maze.
Some people hate baths and say it’s just a way to sit in your own filth. Whatevah! Besides, we’re not pristine beings, and we do better with probiotics in our diet and a little dirt in our homes. For me, the bath is always deeply cleansing, a way to leave behind not just a ring around the but but whatever snarling and snapping little dogs of worry are at my heels. A bath is a way to be naked and okay about it. A bath is a home base before trekking out into the insanity of the world. Each morning, my bath is how I best make the transition from a night of dreams I can or can’t remember and that half-asleep, oh-my-god-it’s-morning dread to being upright enough to walk and talk.
Unlike showers, baths are never in a hurry, and so I can stop time as soon as I settle into the tub and cover myself with the remnants of an inland ocean, pumped up from 200 feet below where we have underground rivers, salty and old. So let’s hear it for bathtubs, and for returning our water bodies to the water that will hold us.
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