Day 83
perspective
I’ve been learning to kayak on the giant reservoir near our house. It is much longer than it is narrow, about a mile end to end. I am learning in a large sea kayak, built for waves. It’s amazing. I’m in love.
Tonight, I was working in some nice rolling waves, uncapped but big enough to wash over the front of the kayak. I like getting right up against the shore, where the grass is taller than I am, sitting low on the water. Geese are hiding their young, small brown birds somehow find a foothold on a single tall blade of grass. I try to stay quiet, to enter their sanctuary with the appropriate amount of awe.
I have been lately trying to grasp and articulate how it is possible to be so far removed from the chaos and pain, but still feel it so deeply. Tonight, my hours in the kayak gave me the words:
Out on the water, you are not so much removed from the land as you are just seeing it, well, from the water. The shift in perspective offers a unique view of what is happening there. Whether you are drifting against the shore, pressed there by the wind, or out in the open water, you are not truly removed.
My spiritual life is like the water, connecting me to the land below and beyond me. It offers a bit of buoyancy, a way to move more fluidly through things. It also requires strength to stay afloat, to move forward or to the side. It does not protect me though; not when I’m seeking authenticity or leaning into reality. I’m in the wind, exposed, and somehow anything but separated from what is happening on land.
There is in this world a myth that to engage the Mystery, to enter into spaces we can not explain, to seek wisdom, comfort…something more real than the real…we have to “escape” the reality around us. We transcend. We close our eyes to pray. The truth is that God is in the waves, in the unstable boat that we use our entire beings to enliven. Once we enter this space, we do not leave the world, we are not sheltered or protected. We have simply shifted our position and gained a different perspective. And while I can see the armies gather on the distant hills, the mobs obsessed with gaining the advantage; there are precious lives in the marsh grasses, humble lives surviving in the shadows of red-winged blackbirds. I can see them. I reach out to touch them as I drift in my prayers.
