floating lessons

“Just lay your head back and look at the sky. Lift your bottom. Stop kicking your feet. Relax, you’ll float if you stop trying so hard to float.”

It was another floating lesson out past the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean. My grandma was the master. I remember watching her in awe as she lifted and lowered with the crests, swells, and valleys of the water. She could float on the surface of the water for what seemed to be hours, according to my limited perception as a child. Sometimes she floated so lifelessly, so effortlessly that I would get concerned she actually wasn’t alive anymore. And it was a lesson I wasn’t so adept at learning. 

This was one of the ocean’s lessons, too. From almost the time of my birth, my family took vacations to the beach. From my earliest memories, the beach and the ocean has felt like home, like a place where a bit of my soul resides and stays until I come and visit her again. 

I learned how to watch for bubbles at the edge of the shore where the sand is compact and yet the thinnest sheet of water still licks. That is where you dig. When the water retreats, stick your finger in the sand where it bubbles to find the tiniest, most colorful clams. 

Just beyond the clams, where the waves pull a little stronger against the sand, watch for the sand fleas (but don’t catch them because they tickle and are kind of gross). They skitter, moving with the water towards the sea, to then bury themselves again to eat whatever microscopic meals they seek among the grains. The fleas had to move quickly before the gulls, flopping their webbed feet along the same line parallel to the shore, made a meal out of them. 

As we stood in water at our ankles, waves washing up and back to the depths, the sand upon which we stood washed out from under and covered our feet, slowly burying us, daring us to stay balanced. 

I learned from aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents how to hunt and catch ghost crabs by stunning their eyes with flashlight beams. I learned how to turn to the side and brace with my feet when a breaker came crashing at the waist, or how to dive under a wave that threatened to crash on my head. I learned how to watch the swells and swim against the increasing pull in order to position my body and then swim like mad in order to ride the crest to the shore. Sometimes it caught me up and spit me out on the shore with my mouth, nose and ears full of its salty sandy contents. But I learned to wrestle back in and ride again. 

But the lessons of floating, the skill of floating was an elusive one. 

“Just put your head back and look at the sky, the water will hold you,” she’d say. I remember wanting to wrestle myself and the water, to force it. Force my body to float, demand the water hold me. I’d put my head back, lift my lower body, try and tread with my arms to keep the rigid frame afloat. But then I’d sink. I’d try kicking and fluttering my feet only to end up with faces and ears full of water. Sometimes I’d feel it, find it, the floating, only to jump and flail when I was lifted or lowered to what I believed was too much and I could no longer see what was coming. 

I haven’t thought much about the lessons of the ocean lately. I miss her––the sea. I miss all the smells, the wind, the ever changing yet ever same views of the endless horizon and how it disappears with the curve of the earth. I miss the sting of the sun and how it crusts sand to skin and hair. But I hadn’t remembered the lessons until recently. Then she came to me…. “just lay your head back,” she says. 

Although nowhere near the sea, I feel myself in the ocean again, standing on what I think might be solid ground to have something pull what I’m standing on and replace it on top of my feet, daring me to stay balanced. I feel the strength I need to turn my back and withstand a force, a breaking point, and to continue on when it has passed. I trust the ability to swim against the strong current to position myself to ride a wave to shore, and even if it catches me just wrong and rolls me, I know how to wrestle my way back and try again. But floating!? To lay my head back, to look at the sky instead of the unpredictable swells and valleys, to surrender to the water and trust it will hold me? I’m spitting and sputtering and sinking. 

This season, this one that is so very short yet feels so very long, so long that I wonder if life as we knew it still exists, is one that is teaching us how to surrender. How to trust. How to be only in the moment and only in the place of now. Having strength, information, ability to force and wrestle, it does no good right now. The lesson of this season, and of floating, asks not for more but for less. To become less, to think less, to do less, to know less, to react less, to plan less, to do nothing more than be still and be carried, held and rocked.

So may we give up the fear, the fear that forces feelings of perceived control. May we give up the fear that we’ll be carried out to sea, that we’ll be lost and directionless. May we give up the fear that there is an unseen enemy lurking beneath the surface. May we give up the fear that drains our energy as we try and tread water. May we instead learn to put our heads back and look up. To rest our limbs from their tireless and unproductive efforts. May we allow the waters to carry us over each hill and through each valley. May we use this time to learn to float.