I am the entire ocean…
Sometimes in life I can feel like a small boat being tossed about in a stormy ocean, thoughts and feelings threaten to overwhelm me like towering waves coming from all angles.
I felt like this recently and was drawn to the sea. I parked on the hill to watch the ocean from the comfort of my car. It was a very windy and my eye caught a piece of white paper in the valley, being whipped and tossed about, pulled and pushed this way and that in all directions. This piece of paper was mirroring how I was feeling.… weightless, helpless, disorientated and no idea when I would come back down to earth.
It was a relief to cry, it felt as if the more than human world had waited for me to pull up and see this scene, as if God didn’t want me to feel alone in this storm. I felt seen, known and comforted.
As I began to relax, my eyes were drawn to the ocean, the cold east wind bringing the waves in at different angles to usual, it made the sea look unfamiliar, turbulent and unpredictable. The storms out at sea and the wind at shore making it messy and choppy.…something prompted me to raise my eye line, beyond the shore…towards the horizon. I began to imagine the ocean beneath the waves. Deep deep down, I knew there was stillness. A place where all was calm and life carries on as usual, unaffected by the storms at the surface.
I took some deep breaths...in and out through my nose…calming my nervous system, balancing my oxygen/carbon dioxide levels. Slowing my heart rate. This I can control. I have learnt to do this in calm weather. In for 5 out for 7…
Then a Rumi quote popped into my head:
‘You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop’
I began to contemplate my hidden depths, the inner sanctuary of calm I call my soul. A place I have come to know through silence and solitude and retreat. A place I meet my truest self and where I meet God. Where all parts of me are loved, accepted and integrated.
I drove away, remembering that paper, the wind, the waves, the horizon and the depths, the stillness, the feeling of being seen, know and loved watching a piece of rubbish flying through the air. Remembering I am the entire ocean in a drop.