the whole of me...

Queasy from the rocking of the boat I get up from my perch on the bough and hang my head over the rail. I feel the wind of traveling at 16 nauts braise my skin. It will be chafed tomorrow with windburn but for now I don't care. It feels good and seems to blow the nausea right out of me. The blue-green of the ocean below stares back mockingly. Just beneath the surface I can see translucent blobs of jellyfish float past. Up ahead the sea otter that's in the water lifts his head from its liquid pillow to see us looming towards him. He languidly rolls over and dives deep into the blue to avoid being hit or being sucked into the ship's engines.

I look to my left and see thousands of puffins nesting in the hundreds of crevasses in the bluffs that have been carved out by nature over thousands of years. Just a few thousand years ago a glacier had been there and then when it melted it carved this beautiful landscape. I notice the deep recesses in the rock, almost like caves, and can see how they have formed by the way the water smashes against them in their farthest and darkest corners. The caves and rock formations seem to be my favorite parts of this cruise through Kenai Fjord National Park. While the eyes of the others on board with me scan the waters for orca whales or other sealife, I find my own eyes continually search the shoreline for an even more beautiful formation than the last and, to my delight, each time they do only get better.

From nowhere, or probably not from nowhere, I am struck with the realization that this entire landscape and those rocks especially are a lot like my life. Not so long ago, although it seems like it sometimes, a glacier had been in the place where my heart now beats. Due to the Son's light and nature the glacier melted leaving in its wake a constant stream of Living Water rushing through me. It was a stream of Water so forceful that over time it carved out ugly spots that were hard as rocks and left them nothing but open and cleansed, beautiful rooms in which the Water could ebb and flow and move about freely.

The Water still looks for and finds other spots that need carving out and immediately goes to work. The process is sometimes slow and painful but always necessary in order for the Water to feel as though it has free reign within the jagged walls of my life. There are deep caverns of which it is impossible to see the farthest wall and these are the places where the most work is needed. They are where ugliness and harshness have rooted their way deep into my core, or where the glacier hasn't completely thawed out yet and there are still hard frozen remnants of an ice age long ago, a time when there was no life, only merely survival. Slowly the Light reaches those places and together with the Water the ice recedes and new life begins. It is in the deepest parts of me where I and the Water are the most intimate, where we come and work together in a holy union. Me, so eager and willing to have more room to offer the Water in which to dwell; my hard surfaces and sharp edges so pliable and obedient to the Water's chiseling; always wanting more, never feeling satisfied with the amount of space that the Water already occupies. The Water, desiring deeply to inhabit every part of me, and waiting patiently knowing that someday I will break completely and offer to it the whole of me.

My head hangs over the rail, heavy and spinning. This time it's not the rocking of the boat; it's a combination of the rush of the Water within me cleansing out yet another part of me together with the life-giving knowledge that someday all the ice and ugly spots will be washed out completely that seem to knock my equilibrium off kilter. The Water is not done with me yet. It might take a while. But I am surprisingly okay with that as long as I know the Water is there to sustain me. I know the Water won't stop rushing because it whispered it to me.