When the storm comes

Are you buoyant enough?

Earlier this year, I was in a season of flourishing. Plain sailing on the professional, relational and spiritual fronts. It has taken me a few decades, but I’ve learned to notice these interludes. A large part of my soul work is the battle against inattentional blindness, our failure to see what is in front of us. I didn’t want to miss it. So I savoured it.

My goodness, am I glad I did. The weather, as weather does, has changed. A squall, which may become a storm, has blown in, smelling familiar and whipping at my hair. Steering through it is going to take all my concentration and a steady hand.

At one point this week someone asked me how I was. I thought for a minute, surveying the shredded sail, the bruises from the boom. Better than I would have expected, I said. I’ve met this storm before. I am learning it’s ways.

It feels odd to be writing about steadiness on the seas. My go-to image, my life image really, is a tree. It’s why all the imagery for this substack is botanical. Fully Aliveness has always felt mainly about putting roots down deep into Love. I have wanted most of all to be stable, to have spiritual core strength. I meditate a lot on a fragment of ancient Hebrew poetry:

“[She] is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of the drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit".

One of the things that most regularly unsteadies me is climate anxiety, and so these verses are usually a comfort. Not this week. It doesn’t feel like a drought. The image of myself as a storm wracked captain has surprised me, supplanting, for who knows how long, my tree-ness. Stillness is not what is required. Maybe its because it is harder for a tree to have adventures. Thalassa, by one of my favourite poets, Louis McNeice, came to mind

Put out to sea, my broken comrades

Let the old seaweed crack, the surge

Burgeon, oblivious of the last

Embarkation of feckless men

Let every adverse force converge

Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades,

Let each horizon tilt and lurch.

You know the worst, your wills are fickle

Your values blurred, your hearts impure

And your past lives a ruined church

But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,

Whose records shall be noble yet

Butting through scarps of moving marble

The narwhal dares us to be free

By a high star our course is set

Our end is life. Put out to sea

Here we must needs embark again. Our end is Life. Put out to sea. It has helped me this week, the feel of salt spray on my skin. I still want safety though, or (knowing that is too much to ask) at least some steadiness, amidst the waves. So I asked the internet: can a boat be steady?

It can. I learned from this charming instructional document (Guiding Fishermen (sic) Safely into the Future! Read it and Live to Fish Another Day!) that a boat is defined as stable when it can right itself after a storm, rather than capsizing.

There is very little I can do about this storm. The older I get, the more I realise this applies to. I might, though, be able to work on my soul-boat.

I learned that a boat’s stability is based on the relationship between two opposing forces: gravity and bouyancy. The weight of the ship and its contents pushing down (G) is balanced by the buoyancy (B) of the hull. If only gravity is at play, the boat, of course, will sink. However, with only bouyancy and no downward force, it will be unstable, popping out of the water and flipping over at the slightest wind. Stability requires both. And I’m clearly not the only one dwelling in this maritime metaphor. Look at the label on “positive stability” below.

I love a random fact and this is a new one: a boat can steady itself in a storm when it’s centre of buoyancy is farther out than it’s centre of gravity. The bouyancy fights back. The gravity can’t win.

Gravity feels familiar. I’ve been working on my roots, on my downward growing. I’m glad of them. I think they are why I am not yet sunk. As it goes on, though, too much gravity might be a risk.

My soul needs, also, to be buoyed. I’ve reached for silliness this week, and reckless decisions (let’s just pick up the kids and go waste money on arcade games and eat burgers) and had coded it as a necessary but possibly unhealthy distraction. Just putting off the processing. Now, through a nautical lens, I can see it as medicine. I can make having fun a central survival strategy, because it will stop me tipping over. Joy will make me stable.

This storm will pass, but other, bigger ones may not. The world may be heading for some hurricanes. We could all do with working on our steadiness, whatever the weather is like where you are. I love the thought that part of that work is lift, delight, fun, silliness and joy. So go find something to raise you up, so you can live to fish another day. That’s an order, sailor, from a Salty Old Sea Dog.

Boat image by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash