Leaving Solid Ground

Lately, in my meditation practice, as I settle in to sit, I've had a mental image of standing at the edge of a pool, then plunging into a sea of unknown dimension. The nearest edge is familiar, the feel of my breathing, the softening tensions in my crossed legs, the settling of breath. But I also have the sensation of being on the edge of something big, and deep, and unknown, and it's sometimes a challenge to really let go and trust.

Who knows what lurks in the deep dark beyond my controlling waking mind, what risks I take when moving from my waking self, crossing the abyss, returning to my waking self on the other side?

Today, as I sat, an anecdote by Bill Bryson rose up in my mind. It comes, I think, from his book about visiting Australia, In a Sunburnt Country. I'm working from memory here, but I think I have the general gist.

Bryson talks of a young couple who were inadvertently left behind at the close of a scuba expedition. By the time the crew of the ship realized their mistake and turned back, the couple was nowhere to be found, and, in fact, they were never seen again.

Speculation is that when they surfaced they found themselves alone at sea, near the diving buoy, with no ship in sight. But they saw a nearby derrick of some sort, and opted to swim toward it, hoping to at least be able to climb out of the water while waiting for the ship to return.

What they did not know was that to get to the derrick they had to swim across a deep, shark-infested, channel, and, presumably, those sharks found the overhead shadows of isolated swimmers first intriguing, then irresistible, and ultimately delectable.

A fairly stark image of dangers from the deep, almost enough to scare one out of meditation, back to the comfortable security of the shore of everyday awareness. Until I realized. . . .

Until I realized that there is really no shore onto which I could climb, only a flimsy web of interconnected thoughts attached to nothing substantial. Until I realized that while the deepest deep is unknown and may well contain dangers, it is really all there is, and my movement toward those depths, however tentative, is inevitable, and really nothing more than my movement toward myself; that no matter how much I long for the security of the beach, it isn't really there.

And I found that strangely comforting as I sank back into stillness, until my session ended and I rose again into the light of the everyday.