Treading
Water
“To have
faith is to trust yourself to the water...”
Alan Watts
Having just come through
yet another Alabama tornado, I can tell you that as well as trusting
yourself to the water, you'd better have a plan of escape. I was
fortunate enough not to be in the path of yesterday's twister, but
Fairfield, on the West side of Birmingham, is pretty well wasted. What tornadoes can do is quite spectacular. One photo of a liquor store
in Fairfield shows a completely demolished building, with neat
shelves of liquor still standing inside. It's as though the building
was simply lifted off its mooring and smashed to the ground, while
everything inside remained untouched. Mystifying is Mother Nature.
The rest of that quote by
Alan Watts reads: “When you swim you don't grab hold of the water
because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and
float.” I think he's talking about life, not flood water, don't
you? It's grasping, or as Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul
calls it, “clinging” that is deadly. In other words, trying
to stop time, stop change, keep things exactly as they are—an
impossibility for living systems.
We all know that water
flows. When enough of it comes down too fast, it also stands. If you
live in the desert and need to see what that looks like, come to my
neighborhood this morning. My backyard, which two days ago was a
savanna of clover and periwinkle, is now a marsh. A big dead limb
fell into the middle of it yesterday afternoon and within five
minutes, birds were pecking around on it for bugs. They know how to
go with the flow. We should take notes.
I didn't post yesterday
because the internet was down. I guess Mother Nature likes neat rows
of liquor better than power lines. She's fickle. Thanks to those of
you who checked on me. I'm treading water here in Alabama. I hope
you're “in the flow” wherever you are.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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