The Book of Awakening
Mark Nepo
“We could never have guessed ~ we were already blessed ~ where we are...”
Learning How to Float
When we stop struggling, we float.
When first learning how to swim, I didn’t trust the deep. No matter how many assuring voices I heard from shore, I strained and flapped to keep my chin above the surface. It exhausted me, and only when exhausted did I relax enough to immerse myself to the point that i would feel the cradle of the deep keep me afloat.
I’ve come to understand that this is the struggle we all replay between doubt and faith. When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to fight with all our might, the terrible feeling that we are sinking. Yet the more we resist, the more we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out.
At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required letting almost all of me rest below the surface before the deep would hold me up. It seems to me, almost forty years later, that the practice of finding our faith is very much like that – we need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld.
This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you let go. And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no real way to prepare for letting go other than to just let go.
Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go clear, feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below the surface.
That we can’t stay there only affirms that we must choose the deep again and again in order to live fully. That we must move through the sense of sinking before being upheld is what trusting the universe is all about.
Two Heart Cells Beating
If you place two living heart cells from different people in a Petrie dish, they will in time find and maintain a third and common beat.” Molly Vass
This biological fact holds the secret of all relationship. It is cellular proof that beneath any resistance we might pose and beyond all our attempts that fall short, there is in the very nature of life itself some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love.
This force is what makes compassion possible, even probable. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away?
This drive towards a common beat is the force beneath curiosity and passion. It is what makes strangers talk to strangers, despite the discomfort. It is how we risk new knowledge. For being still enough, long enough, next to anything living, we find a way to sing the one voiceless song.
Yet we often tire ourselves by fighting how our hearts want to join, seldom realizing that both strength and peace come from our hearts beating in unison with all that is alive. It feels incredibly uplifting that without even knowing each other, there exists a common beat between all hearts, just waiting to be felt.
It brings to mind the time that the great poet Pablo Neruda, near the end of his life, stopped while travelling at the Lota coal mine in rural Chile. He stood there stunned, as a miner, rough and blackened by his work inside the earth, strode straight for Neruda, embraced him, and said, “I have known you a long time, my brother.”
Perhaps this is the secret – that every time we dare to voice what beats within, we invite some other cell of heart to find what lives between us and sing.
When feeling urgent, you must slow down.
“All streams flow to the sea * because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.”
