i looked up douglas long ago and it said in the scottish language, from where it came, it means from the dark water. i think about water a lot, and i feel it in my soul, and it is alive with light, as it appears to me. maybe it is consciousness, what we if we are lucky come to seek. it's light that i seek now. i am from the dark water, and i swam back down into it for years, but now as precious as it may sounds, i swim for the light.
i was talking with a girl at open produce who has a life fear of water. she took the kids to the beach and felt dreadful. for her i think it means death by drowning, though she never even swam. she was born in that fear. i said i simply cannot imagine two things, the fear of dogs, or the fear of water, these are two of the most benign, life giving things. i said i think we must some of us be born with fear of things that came before. atavistic fear. we are not born blank. we are blanketed. as we are born with personality often so unlike our parents, we must be born with specific yet inchoate fears, that seem to be contradictory to experience, or perhaps they actually draw the experience toward us, verifying and manifesting the underlying fear, the trauma experienced somewhere sometime before. there are things that are not of the present, that don't come from the life we now embody. they come before us. they come with us from somewhere. where we were. where were we. maybe we can't know, but we can feel.  

and these things that i try to articulate, i know i've said them before, and i'm left want to say them better, so that i can feel what they mean, to know poetically, so that i may say them again, better this time.