Buoyancy

Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!
Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.
We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

            - from “Buoyancy”, Rumi, 13th Century Persian Mystic

An image comes to mind in reading Rumi’s poem of a person in the midst of a vast and limitless ocean, laying back into the water…opening her chest….breathing…looking up to the sky as her hair spreads like seaweed moving in slow water time. There is a deep sense of trust in this posture. Open, receptive, aware… present.

In my own life this theme of buoyancy has been following me for several years. I find that it manifests in a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual sense. When I am open to the possibility that the water of life will support me, that all I really have to do is breathe and be aware of my current moment, then I find buoyancy. Physically: my muscles relax, my chest expands, the top of my head lifts in extension of my spine. Mentally and emotionally: I become open to connections with my immediate environment. I see more. I let go of the striving and the stress of the fast paced illusion of living. Spiritually: I become aware of more than myself.

My eyes, hands, and heart open.  

In this buoyant state I receive the beauty of the world around me 

Perhaps it is helpful to also describe the opposite, a state I am all too familiar with: to strive ceaselessly to remain always at the crest of a wave, reaching towards a distant goal, to struggle and thrash about in the waters, believing that it is only through treading water that I will survive, that I will matter, that I will be enough.

This collection of writing and photography is an attempt at seeing the world through this lens of buoyancy, at bringing curiosity to the now, and at witnessing the love and connection that exists between all things. It is an exploration of what it means to live with the spirit of buoyancy and reception.