Eddy Time

It goes on, this mind of mine, working on my troublesome website, a pain in the neck.  And this morning as I waken to unresolved problems with it, this blog reminds me that I am committed to this quieting, this receptivity, this being in the presence of all within me that is not mine, but given to me, to give to whoever reads it. 

I don’t want to call it prayer, because the world has besmirched and desecrated words like that, like “prayer” and “God” and “religion” and even “love.” People call “making love” the act of conjugation that is too often just having sex; people “love” the new this or new that when all they are doing is participating in the orgy of consumerism.  So I’ll not call it prayer, this thing that I do, this place into which I abandon myself in the morning.

Kathy and I stopped in Basel on our way from Austria to France on our first mad trip to Europe, covering as much ground as we could to take a first taste of Italy, Germany, and France, in the hope that we would return, now that our kids were out of the house and their tuition payments out of our budget.  We saw something that I suggest here is what I do in the morning, and what I was tempted not to do this morning, driven to solve the website problem.

The Mittlere Rheinbruke – Middle Rhine Bridge – is the ancient bridge crossing through the center of Basel.  Gazing across it from the streets on either side is one of the activities that naturally call to the traveler.  As Kathy and I fell naturally into that gaze, our ears heard voices and laughter on the river, and our eyes followed the sound to a group of kayakers who were playing in the current of the river by paddling their kayaks into the lee, the eddy, the sort of shadow of the current behind the five ancient upright piers of the bridge, where the water was quiet.  They would hold their kayaks there, then nose into the current and let their boats be taken by the swift current, the river playing with them, taking them where it willed.  Again and again they would repeat it, paddling madly upstream between the piers, then following the current under the bridge and hiding in one of the eddies, resting and laughing there, then nosing again into the energy and movement of the river. 

I remember learning to swim as a grade school boy.  I remember the lithe young high school girl standing in front of the formation of us at the poolside, leading us in the motions in the stoke before we tried it in the water: "Uuuuuuuuup, strooooooooooke, gliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide.... Uuuuuuuuup, strooooooooooke, gliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide..."  When we eagerly got into the water to try it, we thrashed around madly, proving the accuracy of Bill Cosby’s comedic definition of swimming as “trying to stay alive while in the water.”  The instructor blew her whistle and called us all out of the pool, got us mimicking the stroke in the air again, this time reminding us to gliiiiiiiiiiiiiide.  When we got back into the water, we discovered that the stroke, like the current of the Rhine, got us moving; the glide let us rest, relax our breathing, and be ready for the next stroke.

It is morning s like this, preoccupied by some “urgency” that I am tempted to dive in and thrash around.  By the grace of this morning habit, I found myself steering my speeding kayak into the quiet eddy in the swift current of my river of rushing, and remain there.  And in a little while I will publish this, and nose into the current, and let the river take me onward.  I smile recalling that laughter, there in Basel, overlooking the Mittlere Rheinbruke.  Call it prayer if you like.  Or just call it the gliiiiiiiiiiiiide.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.