Sharing a piece I wrote back in January during Writer’s Night with my writing club. We’ve been writing together for around 5 years now, in person or via Zoom, depending on the circumstances (more on this later). Our standard practice is to choose a prompt or two, usually either from a list of prompts by the brilliant Cheryl Strayed, or by pulling an Animal Spirit Card and selecting a word or phrase that speaks to us. Then we write for 20-30 minutes and take turns sharing what we’ve written. Our only rule? No one is allowed to apologize for what they’ve written, which is surprisingly hard for a group of women / recovering perfectionists and people pleasers. This group and this practice has been such a gift in my life, and it’s fun to stumble on little gems I’ve written over the years in my various journals. This piece was written based on the phrase “life’s current”, from the Fish card.
Life’s current. Something I haven’t always trusted, but it’s brought me everything I have. Trusting in the flow, letting it take me, rather than planting my feet in the sand and resisting. It feels wrong to trust, in this hustling world of ours, to sit back and allow what is meant for me to come, rather than exerting control, bending the water to my will like the gods of old.
For days after surfing, I see waves rolling toward me anytime I close my eyes. Sometimes I dream of them, these vast walls of water moving toward me with an unstoppable force, and the dread I feel is primal. They will do with me what they will. I have no power here.
But outside of dreams, behind my closed lids or even out in the Pacific, hand raised to shade my eyes from the explosion of sun across the blue horizon, I watch them coming. Small at first, barely a ripple, then mounting, soft-edged like hills, then steeper now as they meet the shallow sand, ready to peak and pitch at any moment to some unknown end. Mine to catch if I am there, in the zone of impact, the room where it happens. Mine to catch if I’m in the right place at the right time, if I’ve been watching with intent, making my moves to get there. Mine to catch mostly if I have the guts, if I’m willing to try and be seen trying, not knowing whether I’ll fail or fly.
The swell does what it will, it comes and goes. Lying dormant for long stretches, then hammering the shore with wave after wave, a raw power that could take your breath away. Then it drops away again, a horizon of stillness.
Life’s current moves me along and never stops, even if I wind up caught in an eddy, tucked away out of the flow, caught on a branch, or swirling around in a whirlpool of my own making, neither standing still nor moving forward. But the swell, with its coming and going, its stretches of stillness when it seems like another wave may never come, and then those times when you’re caught inside getting hammered and it’s like the waves will never end.
The swell speaks to me. It makes my own fallow periods okay, necessary even, for the force that will follow. It reminds me that I will write again, after barely feeling the grip of a pen in almost a year now. It reminds me that I will feel strong again, after feeling big and slow and tired and heavy, then being sliced open and stitched back together again and handed a ball of absolutely bottomless need to put before myself forever more. It reminds me that I will work again, have relationships with clients and feel my purpose in the world again, outside of this most intense purpose I wake up to each and every morning. It reminds me to be patient, to trust in life’s current and the swells of my own nature. It reminds me that stillness comes before the glory of waves crashing on the shore.
Yayyyy!!! One of my favorite things you’ve ever written, I think! I’m lucky I got to be one of the first to hear it :). So glad you put it out in the world! ♥️