Presencing the Presence Within – Part V

Practicing Presence with Pain: Inquiring. Softening. Beholding.

As I write this morning, the great Pacific Ocean sounds nearby. Waves roll in, one by one, each collapse onto shore, an outbreath, a release. An end and a letting go. There is a certain groan the ocean makes when a wave falls over. There is a certain protestation of water pounding land, each altogether unforgiving of the other. Melancholy moves through this sound, whispering a reminder of the pain that is. It is a sound at the end of a promise – the wave was always heading this way, always undulating toward, always coming to its own end.

But so, too, are sea and shore the other’s softening. And their meeting is play and playground. Watch as a wave’s energy swells. See it rise and meet its moment of what it no longer has the tensile strength to bear. Watch it there, curling over and collapsing, laughing the whole way, like Sisyphus with the boulder’s every downhill tumble. Then, the white foam of it creeping onto shore, crawling a little more from time to time, as if to suggest that sea…