The Hungry Sea

Pages from a prayer journal

Photo by Emiliano Arano on Pexels.

When I was in the first or second grade, we had to attend compulsory swimming lessons. I must have been absent for a few of them because when it came time to test our progress, I pushed off from the edge, splashed a bit with my jelly arms and promptly sunk. Not sure who rescued me but I do recall the certificate proclaimed that I’d swum “1 metre,” which I might have asked Mum to enhance with a zero to make it a more respectable document.

Obviously, I’m no swimmer, and yet, I’ve always been fascinated by the sea, ever drawn like a magnet to its secrets. Now that I’m researching my great-grandmother’s life, and know that as a young woman she crossed the Atlantic for love, for the promise of a fresh start in a new place, I wonder about the impact of that journey on my field-tilling ancestor. I imagine her clutching the rail as she peered into the abyss, hands bronzed by the Galician summer and the soil of her homeland mourning dark dashes beneath each fingernail.

I wonder if her fear and wonder somehow found a home in me.

When I was around 7, I wrote this poem, and my Year 3 teacher Miss Griffin did me the great honour of sticky-taping it to our classroom wall.

The Hungry Sea

The sea, waiting for boats
to come down and sink
into its hungry mouth
all sorts of creatures, great and small
waiting for their prey to come
nobody knows and nobody cares
what is the mystery of the sea?

Going through my oldest prayer journal today (really just a pad of thin, lined paper, one of those where all the sheets eventually drift free of their sticky binding), I came across this entry, which made me think of my early poem.

While I often share my Love Letters from Love, this is a Love Letter to Love.

Reading it, I also realised that it paints a clear picture (to me, at least) of where I was at in my process of awakening to the dance between my inner life and the Great Mystery. It was a porous place, that stage, a boundaryless plain where I would all too readily mould myself into whatever or whomever was asked of me. My agency screams its absence in these lines and events that followed confirm it (a story for another day).

Praying with my pen that spring day a decade ago, I forgot the ferocious might of the sea - and the sea inside. I was yet to realise I could – indeed, must – balance the impulse to flow and give, with the remembrance of the well of quiet power deep in the heart of the ocean.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

A heart that is open, as the sea is open to the sky – that is my heart.

I close my eyes and see the velvety denseness of eternity in shades of inky purple, a beautiful bed of moving light. In my very aim to see beyond that light lies my undoing – for that aim, that reaching, can only be of the ego, which always wants wants wants. I must be an empty vessel, only then can I be filled with that exquisite light, which is alive with life and wisdom and love, which pulses with the secrets of the universe.

Therein lies the paradox – the more I reach and ache, the less I can receive. I must be free of desires and expectations, as free as the sea, as humble as the sea, as it prostrates itself – infinitely – at the foot of the cliffs, at the edge of the shore. The sea does not search for anything – it just flows, endlessly and lovingly, and in that endless flowing, it is filled with life.

In its endless flowing, it nourishes the life that teems within it. For others are drawn to shelter in its depths and feed at its heart. The sea gives endlessly – and so must I.

I must not seek and reach, I must only give – be open open open, for how else can I be filled?