A Story Half Finished

Yesterday I executed one of the more perfect front surfs I have had for a while. Water levels and the looseness and ease of my river-body conspiring together. The drip of damp moss-covered stone alongside moving water, the simultaneously decaying and verdantly alive forest rich in my lungs, the contour of river bed and bottom coming together in just the right way. All these irregular natural forms; seeming imperfection and disorder uniting to create a momentary phenomena just the right size and shape.
This is one perfect and complete moment in the midst of incompletion and discomfort.

This, it seems is what life is made of sometimes. We can find ourselves, as I do now, in the middle of a mysterious plot line - living into some untenable situation or dynamic. Upon reflection today I am aware of my own ability to traverse things that are difficult, my tendency to want to face up to things, to hear the truth, the real truth of my own and another's heart, including what is beyond words and more than human. To step into the fires of misunderstanding and pain to the wholeness that lies on the other side. And also knowing that I can't do this alone and have little control of who chooses to join me.

I have many critics, most of whom live inside of me. They tell me that I should let go more quickly, lighten up, be more loving or less judgmental, less contemplative and more playful or vice versa as the occasion arises. It's possible I have a disorder that centres around seeing too many sides of the same situation. It can be paralyzing, knowing that all perspectives are true, seeing them all co-existng at once. But this is also one of my greatest gifts, this tolerance for ambiguity and multiplicity, and I need to learn to embrace it more fully. To balance it by grounding in my salient truth, by hearing my own voice just one decibel higher than all the others. To make sure the course I am on is my own, attuned carefully to my sensitive inner compass.

The perfect wave can be narrow and fast, with irregularities in flow and texture - there is a need to make constant but minute adjustments, to carve just the right amount left or right. Tilt down the face, or let the paddle drag a moment longer to match the quiet pulse of the earth and the trees and the flow of river water underneath my hull.  Turn the body in some minute and particular way. This is not a stationary art form.

Today I have given myself permission to do whatever I want. To lie still and silent or rage against imbalance or cry or beg myself for forgiveness. I tend towards wholeness, I seek to mend, heal, bring about a return to the table. It is something I beat up on myself about, because it makes me vulnerable; this tendency I have to seek out the things that do not seem to want me. But appearances are deceiving, and today I discover that this is perhaps what is most beautiful about my way of being. This capacity for wholeness, of allowing of all the facets of things complex and dense to take and change form.

To sit in incompletion is no longer a weakness, but a gift, a cure. In it rests an imagination big enough to contain the universe in all it's detail and vastness. It no longer matters whether my invitations are accepted, because there is peace in simply issuing them. Together with a generous measure of fear, the possibility of humiliation and some sadness I am releasing them at the end of fingertips, a grateful and wanton flinging of intention. I will trust that only what is worthy will return to me. What is not can drift into dust, settling into the ground to mark the trail ahead.

I am learning to rest more often in the faith that all is not 'well' or as it 'should' be, but just as it is, and that is enough. To be at home in the middle of the story, when all seems lost or confused, knowing that another plot twist is coming. This life is made of a thousand beginnings, middles and conclusions, overlapped and layered, nested in infinity. And for now there is always another perfect wave waiting to take form, waiting for the right number of raindrops and the precise speed at which the forest wants to release them into our watershed. We are unimaginably influenced by the shallowest tilts of the earth, the slightest breath of wind.