Photo courtesy of: ‘Letting Go’ by petraboekhoff – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y9gx7zur
LETTING GO…
I have two friends that had the fear-filled drowning experience as very young boys… each in their own way. One of them actually went under, lungs filled with water, heart stopped, but the spark of life hadn’t completely extinguished, and rescuers brought him back. The other boy was swimming with others and swept out by currents way stronger than he, and his would-be rescuer could only bring his friend back to shore in the rough and choppy water… so the rescuer told him not to panic, to float with the current even though he would be carried further out, but once free of the pull of the current, he would be able to float and swim into shore at his own pace. And that was how he survived. They each felt a ‘relinquishing’ in their own way… LETTING GO… of the paralyzing fear of dying.
One of the boys grew to write the poem below… and to me, it points to ‘letting go’ of what we cling to in each instant, in moments, in memories, fearful dreams, or desires… we are habitually forward-directed, an urge learned to engage time as infants, reaching for that next object. LETTING GO… the feel of unclenching, relaxing the hold… is actually available in every moment, like the surface tension of a bubble that opens to all that is outside itself… as it pops. It is freedom… it is opening beyond the contents of our own self-enclosure…
AT SEA AT LAST
By Ken McKeon
Fashionable as drifting Autumn leaves,
Slow swirls of light spun
Desperados
Doing up the evening like Astaire
Does on a vast starlit stage
Before a full house of swells,
Everything at last is a crumbling
Construct of a fading mind,
A child’s clinging to the edge
Of what he thinks
Is the local plunge,
But it’s not,
It’s a wooden plank,
It’s all that’s left
Of a boat sunk just recently,
And he is not as he thinks himself to be,
For all the babble,
For all the cracked and cracking memories,
He is himself alone,
A raw breath, a throat clutch, done.
That sounds like an article I read about a two-year-old Michael Gray being pulled out of the cold waters of Lake Ontario by a brave neighbor, Marjorie, who ran down the sloping lawn when she saw my hand waving (perhaps for a third and final time) above the surface, dove in, found me, swam back to shore, but then could only hold onto the rocks with one hand and me with the other, until she was herself was rescued and both of us pulled up onto the shore.
Precisely! And three quarters of a century later you are still swimming… along with the rest of us. :-)