“When you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.” – Toni Morrison

My toddler has become the master of two word sentences. “Mama lap” is one of his most frequent and it works to make me sit down, pull him onto my lap and read him a book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about words lately. How we string them together and hope they convey what we want and need and maybe if we are lucky, even reach another person where they live. So I’ve gone back through my most beloved meditations and books and picked out five of the most inspirational things I’ve read that have pulled me up, changed my perspective and touched my heart.

Learning How to Float

When we stop stuggling,
we float.

When first learning how to swim, I didn’t trust the deep. No matter how many assuring voices I heard from shore, I strained and flapped to keep my chin above the surface. It exhausted me, and only when exhausted did I relax enough to immerse myself to the point that I could feel the cradle of the deep keep me afloat.

I’ve come to understand that this is the struggle we all replay between doubt and faith. When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to fight with all our might the terrible feeling that we are sinking. Yet the more we resist, the more we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out.

At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required letting almost all of me rest below the surface before the deep would hold me up. It seems to me, almost forty years later, that the practice of finding our faith is very much like that – we need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld.

This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you let go. And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no real way to prepare for letting go other than to just let go.

Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go clear, feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below the surface.

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo