a musing

We walk as if we know where we are going.

We hear so many talk as if they know what they are saying.

We can love so much. We love mothers, brothers, children, friends.  We love dreams, intimacy with nature in its myriad magnificence, sights, smells, sounds. But when death comes to that which we love, it shocks us out of any other certainty we might entertain.

We are trained to feel nothing at the death of strangers, but when we know the one who passes, when we love that which is taken from us, it is not easy to keep the wave at bay. Some close eyes, hold breath, wait for it to pass and try to go on as if it was never theirs, as if the wave took nothing from them. Some never let go of the loss. But the ocean of life is incessant in its motion. Sooner or later another wave hits. So many deaths in a lifetime and as we survive them the only certainty that remains is the ocean in which we swim: too vast to see beyond, holding too strongly to every atom of our being, and pulsing with the omnipotent rhythms of life.

We learn to swim but yearn to rest.

It would be truly hopeless but for the fact that the ocean gives as it takes. For every death there is a birth, although we may not see it. We can move with the swell, or struggle against it. A surfer knows how to move with the ocean, when and where to focus energy, when and where to surrender. Surfers in the cosmic sea of life, we learn how to read the sea, and to respect its majesty.

So it may seem that we know where we are going, or that we know what we mean when we speak. In fact, we may know nothing more than the certainty of nature. The details seem irrelevant, insignifcant when viewed in the context of the vast ocean in which all of life swims. There are laws at work it seems, rules that govern systems far greater than the will of any human being.

When we truly know that we know nothing, we can walk as if we know where we are going because we know where we are; the ocean is where we breathe and move and have our being. It brings everything we need and takes everything we think we have. When we understand this, we can surrender, or not.

The choice of action is ours, but the choice of existence is not. We are part of this greater system. We are all human. Race, culture, language and the myriad reasons we have to divide ourselves all deny this simple fact: we are all part of something greater than a nation or a language.