Leonard Cohen died yesterday. Many of his songs and lyrics have been shared on social media and I came across one I haven’t seen before, one that perfectly reflects my mood today: “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”

Right now it’s hard to become to ocean. I often feel seasick and keep reaching for the raft. But the raft has holes in it. When I hear of heightened bullying, I feel grief and fear for my LGBT friends and people of color, for Muslims and for people who have been traumatized by bullies and sexual predators. The last two include me. Everything is upside down and I am drowning.

But then, in the quiet, surrendering to my grief, to the groundlessness, I remember that I am the waves, the ocean. My heart comes to rest for a while and I’m no longer seasick.

I wrote “Riding Free” at another time when I couldn’t stay afloat. This surrender is what serves me in the roughest waters when the boat doesn’t hold. From this place I can find my way again, I can swim and I can serve.

Riding Free

Its like you’re throwing away your canoe and oars and are riding the waves of emptiness. Its scary at first, you’ve no control. You feel vulnerable and completely without knowledge of where you are going, or even where you are. So you have to surrender completely to the waves when they come. It may take a while. It may take weeks or months or years. You may ask, “what if I drown?” Then I ask you, “who and what drowns? What do you lose? And what might you gain?”

You may decide to climb back into your canoe if you can. But if you’re truly on this path, the water will draw you in again and again until finally you drown and then you’re riding the waves and those waves are you, and you are the waves, there’s really no difference any more, and you arrive exactly where you need to be, where you always have been, but just didn’t know it until now. You are home.