Crossing the Sea of Now

A despondent young lady approached her Mentor, stuck and alone.

Several years prior, after witnessing a death, several illnesses, and old-age gone terribly awry, she had gone on a retreat and re-committed to the Present Moment .

Thousands of times over the days that passed she simply came back to the Present Moment whenever she saw that she had forgotten. As the number of days grew, puddles of Present Moment got larger and started to touch each other, until there was just a Sea of Now, surrounding her.

She came back to her job and the world, and watered her daily ground from that Sea faithfully.

All was well, until it wasn't. Several months in the Sea, it seemed, were not enough to inoculate her from suffering, and she found herself pulled back from the Sea, through the puddles, and dropped at her Mentors feet.

'What was the point?' she asked, drying Sea and tear-duct saline from her face.

All those moments into days into months living from The Now - the space she was able to offer others; the bus-seats given up; the eye contact with the destitute, the late highway-mergers waved in; the silent connection with strangers she would never be introduced to - all of that giving, and yet
here she was, suffering, again. Clearly the Sea hadn't delivered her to God's shore; it had either spit her up short, or simply dried up.

Her Mentor, of course, saw holiness in the brokenness. She met her young student where she was, loved her as she was, and mid-wifed her back to the Sea. Entrance this time, however, was conditioned on abandoning her beliefs and expectations on a funeral pyre that had been burning for generations.

And the young lady entered; and the swimming became floating, and the floating, Surrender. Suffering returned often, and she felt it more deeply, but she never felt it alone.

36 years later she found herself back on the shore, by the funeral pyre, sighing a goodbye to her Mentor, and offering an embrace to another young lady, destitute at having been launched from the Sea, and desperately seeking purchase back.

#Jan 30, 2020