BAINA Bathe
Vol 42.
Alex Crowder

Alex Crowder is a New York based florist and the founder of Field Studies Flora, a design studio who works with nature. Guided by an ethos of harnessing the raw alchemy of the earth, Field Studies sourcesfrom local growers and foragers to ensure materials travel a short distance and pass through as little hands as possible while appreciating the diverse flora growing in close proximity to bustling New York City.

Alex considers bathing as an elemental act of harmony. In this edition she speaks on returning to water, the substance we are predominantly made of and how it's pull is linked to our instinctive relationship with the natural world. With days marked by soil, sap, sweat and the occasional trace of blood the realities of floristry are far from romantic. Bathing offers a moment to rinse away the physical remnants of the day.

"Bathing, for me, is basically just remembering I'm made of water — mostly water, actually, the same stuff as the rivers and oceans I came out of, evolutionarily speaking — and occasionally letting it take me back for a few minutes. There's no real boundary there to begin with.

I think that's what Ana Mendieta understood as an artist, working from some older, almost instinctual knowledge women seem to carry about being close to the earth, to cycles, to that whole cosmic-mother logic — she pressed her body into earth and water until the outline gave out, like she was just returning matter to matter.

My schedule for escaping into water is dictated by whatever flora passed through the studio that day. As a florist, there's a comical misconception of softness and beauty. In reality, it's sweat, soil, sap, and blood, courtesy of the occasional puncture wound from spikes of Ornamental Citrus."

"I inherited gestures from different women in my family who each used water as a form of repair without ever calling it that. A bath being prepared for you. A cloth soaked in cold water to soothe aches and pains. It's practical, universal, and somehow still tender. I grew up in a Christian household — water rituals and stories featuring water were plentiful. Baptism, Jesus walking on water, Moses parting the Red Sea, Noah's Ark, Jonah and the Whale... all planted seeds of water marking a before and an after; you go in one way and come out another. I'm not saying I'm channeling something ancient every time I get into a lake. But I do think that instinct is older than any of us.

In the city, a bathing routine is often about logistics — the sauna at the end of a rough week, water that's hot because I need to soothe a muscle. Functional. Fast.

But come summer, the second I can get out to the woods, the whole equation changes. It's not even really a choice at that point, it's closer to a craving — granite still warm from the sun under my back, water cold enough to take the air out of my lungs for a second before my body adjusts.

The Atlantic doesn't ease you in. It's salt stinging a scrape you forgot you had, kelp brushing your ankle and making you flinch. The lakes and rivers are gentler but no less specific with water so still it holds the shape of the sky, lily pads that smack wetly against your arm when you swim through them, mud between your toes that's somehow both repulsive and exactly what you wanted."