Breaking Waves

I like to think of myself as strong, sturdy, enduring, and secure. Like a large building made of steel and concrete, double thick glass windows that reflect strong light, a foundation without cracks. Like a skyscraper, I can withstand the strongest winds, the fiercest rain, shifts in tectonic plates. My inhabitants remain cool in heat, warm in cold, and dry in hurricanes.

To be honest however, I do not resemble a building in the least but am more like a wave that rises full and glorious before crashing into nothingness onto the shore. To see myself as the wave that I am - something I get glimpses of more and more as I age - is terrifying. How could I endure loosing myself time and time again, of everything I hold dear, everything that makes me what I am. Terrified of crashing into nothingness, I scramble to make steel and concrete from my watery self, an alchemy as foolish as trying to turning coal into gold. I exhaust myself in this process of keeping up appearances as a building, propping myself into a sturdy rigidity, looking like and acting like all the other buildings that surround me.

What I forget to remember, and must be taught over and over and over again, is that my wave is a part of something much greater than itself, something it cannot never know fully but that endures even after the wave itself has died.

While buildings can tilt, crumble, burn, and collapse, waves come and come again, rising up from an ocean that is infinite, life giving, welcoming; it is never separate from this source.