Earth in its elemental form is smooth, shiny wet and a motley of muted colors.
The Tawas lake bed
I spent the morning picking up rocks from the sandbed, turning them over in my hand as I waded ankle-deep in the cool lake water.
It’s days like these that I too feel reduced to my elemental form. No agenda, restless desires or the feeling of never meeting expectations.
But just OK to be quiet, trailing behind my husband as he too scans the lake bed for unfound treasure.
What I see as I trail behind
I wonder why this state is so elusive – why I wake up in Montreal with racing thoughts, trying to problem solve my life before the day even begins.
Or why I have to fight to rest on the weekends, telling myself that this is the point of the day, while the dread of Monday morning looms.
And why I have a hard time embracing the week when it comes with all of its unpredictability.
I deeply desire to sink deeper into moments like these – when the truth of being a small but valuable created being wraps me up in its arms, and I don’t have to be bigger than this truth.
Like when my husband is sailing the Sunfish so I don’t have to think about anything else except pulling and cleating the rope when he tells me to.
Getting ready to sail the Sunfish
I have no idea where I’m going – the water all looks the same to me – but I know where I am and whose I am.
Loved by Peter, sitting safe beside him – this fact is more important to me than where I’m going.
I don’t think we were made to sail the ship, as modern technology would have you believe:
Find out who you are, follow your passion, craft your own destiny, we are told.
And yet we find ourselves in the depths of anxiety and depression, crumbling under the weight of having to figure it all out.
The very freedom we killed ourselves to get – freedom to determine our future – is suffocating us instead.
We want identity and purpose – but we want it on our own terms.
We will not relinquish control, even when our sailboat is blustering about on the choppy waters, blown here and there, led by our fumbling and prideful hands.
But what if freedom was not deciding for life to be exactly how you want it
-because how do we actually know what we want anyways? –
but instead a giving of one’s self, a binding to someone other than you.
A submission to the truth that there is One who knows what you want more than you yourself.
One who holds the rope steady so all you have to do is sit beside Him in a blustering wind.
One who picks you up in your most elemental self, when you feel washed up by the waves of life, turns you over in His hand, and puts you in His pink pail so you are His for the keeping.
I think about the words of Jake Meador on what we lose by our search for autonomy:
We have imagined a world red in tooth and claw, cold and heartless, where the only way to basic personal safety, let alone any loftier goals, is to look out chiefly for yourself and to trust our society’s institutions to watch out for you.
So we define our identities apart from any deep engagement with land or neighbor…there are always more mountaintops to blow up to access coal, more streams to pollute, more habitats to destroy, more animals to kill in our quest for personal peace and affluence.
And when exploiting the land won’t work, we turn to other ways of building up ourselves without a regard for neighbor.
We practice selfish sex and bounce through partners without vows, without fidelity, without fruitfulness.
We even tear at our own bodies through drugs and surgery, all in search of a peace that we are made to know yet struggle to lay our hands on.
And now, as we confront a world that is rapidly warming and, ironically, becoming hostile to life, and as we confront our loneliness and anxiety and despair and mental illness – what then?
More technology? More institutions? More liberation?
…There is something true about binding our life to the life of the world, even if that requires giving up our love affair with the fiction of endless cheap energy.
There is beauty in marital fidelity, even when it comes at a cost.
There is something invigorating and delightful in allowing ourselves to be defined by our neighborhood and our neighbor, even when that means we lose some of our own autonomy.
Jake Meador, “What are Christians for? Life together at the end of the world”
Me reading Jake Meador out on the dock
Gorgeous photos and musings, Viv! Thanks for sharing. “ One who picks you up in your most elemental self, when you feel washed up by the waves of life, turns you over in His hand, and puts you in His pink pail so you are His for the keeping.” Love the extended metaphor!