Today we’re headed for the soulscape of the oceans and rivers. It’s a challenge to select excerpts to share with you, but most especially in a soulscape that offers so many different shapes and forms, from steam to ice. This, however, comes from the chapter on “Generosity.”
“According to underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, each of the twenty-eight bones of the human skull can be traced back to the bony part in the head of a prehistoric fish. The same tidal surges that move fish and stir the ocean tug at our bodies too. On a full moon night we toss, restless in our beds, caught in the rising tides of our swelling emotions.
“But we are severing this intricate connection.
“In their grand generosity the oceans are sacrificing themselves for us. Absorbing more and more of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere, seawater is becoming so acidic that it is dissolving and eating away the shells of small shell creatures like crabs, oysters, and krill (the major food sources for fish like salmon, herring, and mackerel). Coral reefs are bleaching and dying. Like the good mother she is, the ocean is taking the heat, quite literally, for global warming.
“How have we managed to lose such regard for our great mothering ocean? How have we forgotten our debt to her and our deep kinship with her? ‘The ocean refuses no river, no matter where that river has been or what it might have picked up on its journey, writes the activist Ocean Robbins. When we pollute our oceans, the toxins find their way back into our tears and our human mothers’ amniotic fluid. How can we revere rather than destroy the elemental entity that gave birth to us?”
(From “Reclaiming the Wild Soul”, White Cloud Press, October 2014)
When you consider your connection to the mothering ocean, what response does it bring forth in you? Do you feel called to protect the ocean, perhaps change some behaviors, or simply apprentice yourself to ocean’s generosity. Love to know how the oceans inspire you.
This next excerpt follows a story in a chapter called “Flow” from the oceans and rivers section of my book. I tell about running the rapids on the Klamath River in a small kayak, and being gifted faith and courage by an osprey that flew above my left shoulder the whole way.
“I thought about rivers starting as a trickle, high in hills or mountains, and gathering force as they descend, swelling into streams, feeding off tributaries, getting broader and bigger. I wondered if faith didn’t grow this way too: slight and slow and then deepening and widening with time. And what it would take for my faith to truly flow?
“We live in a world that dominates nature, and this leads us to dominate as a habit––other people, and worse still, our own spirits. As one of my students wrote, “I am weary of all the internal rules of how I ‘should’ be that disconnect me from the wild flow within.”
“Perhaps faith is nothing more than embracing the wild flow that courses within each of us. In catching sight of the osprey that day, I felt as if Spirit had arrived to remind me that I was always being looked after—that it would be okay to surrender to the current.”
[From “Reclaiming the Wild Soul,” White Cloud Press, October 2014.]
In what ways might faith be like a river that flows within us? How might it be like surrendering to the flow of the current? Love to have you share you thoughts.
