What the Body Says - August 30, 2010

I was born here, and

I belong here, and

I will never leave.

The blue heron's

gray smoke will flow over me

for years

and the wind will decide

all directions

until I am safely and entirely

something else.

I am thinking this

this winter morning...

of transformation

Of course

I wonder about

the mystery

that is surely up there

in starry space

and how some part of me

will go there at last.

But I am talking now

of the way the body speaks,

and the wind, that keeps saying,

firmly, lovingly:

a little while and then this body

will be stone; then

it will be water; then

it will be air.

I am thinking about yesterday morning when I was swimming in the Ichetucknee river. While in that cold water that carried me and my burdens, I transformed. For the nearly two hours of snorkeling and flowing with all we saw, I knew that I belonged as surely as did the blue heron preening amidst the storks on the river side. This was not a cognitive knowing, for there is no thinking other than marvel and wonder as we swam down river. The body, though, merges into one just as this river will merge into one via the Sante Fe, Suwanne, Gulf, and Atlantic Ocean. With turtles and Ibis at nose level only a few feet away I become bird and reptile. Floating under a cypress tree where an Osprey has just taken an unlucky perch, I become fish. Eyes nearly as wide open as the family of otters snacking on river bottom mussels, I am bivalve and mammal.

Upon exiting the river, reluctantly, I shiver for nearly an hour as my core temperature returns to normal, especially difficult as a wind has come up. This wind wings a message out from my heart of love and gratitude that at least for a short while yesterday I knew no separate self.

Where do you experience flow in your life?