What is all this talk of swimming?

I shall let the Current take me instead.
“Carry me to where you wish,” I told him.

Paddling upstream had become a tedious chore,
The Current chose for me another direction instead.

“You must go down,” he said.
So down—
down I went.

Down,
through all the old places in me
that I had fastidiously constructed,
those thick waters of my own self making,
past the turbulence and rapids of my youth,
through the forests and naps of my childhood,
into the dim soft channel of my original birth.

I floated down.

The misconception was that I ever needed a paddle,
so much time and energy I had spent doing the front crawl.

Down,
down was where the current wanted me to travel,
into the depths of my own unconscious ocean.

Down,
down so far that I was surrounded by blackness and could not see even a flicker of the day.

Down,
he floated me on.

Past all ideas I had ever manifested and every construct I had made of right or wrong.

Through each should have and should have not,
I was guided.

Down,
down to the very bottom of creation,
where the pressure was so thick and dense I did not think I could breath.

Still further,
the current took me.

‘Till all my knowledge of who I was had vanished.
‘Till I was underneath every belief that I had ever formed,
just a silhouette,
with no words and no memories,
no frame of reference,
of past
or future.

The current carried me on—
to the place where there was no struggle or fight,
he took me.

Any thought I had of repair or renewal disappeared too.

He floated me down.

So now I only knew what was quiet,
that which was made up of absolute emptiness,
stillness
and peace.

The current floated me down,
into the depth of the darkness from which I had first risen.

Down he took me—
to the very bottom
where he left me and something else caught hold.

It held me by my toe,

and I experienced,
there at the base of my being,
in the depth of nothingness,
that I still did have the ability to float.

It was then that I surrendered wholly and completely.

Finally the darkness that I had been paddling away from,
surrounded me and filled me.

And,
it was while engulfed and fully consumed,
that I ultimately transformed,

into the essence of what had been my original making,
into a weightlessness,
pure
and clear.

Floating down there,
cocooned in the darkness,
was where,
I became the peace I had been looking for.

The current,
had floated me down.

Down,
down past all the layers of my creation,
and there he left me.

He had wanted me to know where it was that I would find my light.

.

Relephant: 

The Unexpected Intimacy of Rain.

 

Author: Sarah Norrad

Editor: Yoli Ramazzina

Photo: Flickr/Will Folsom