Rapids

Sweet surrender.

Nature for me is very fluid, liquid, always moving, and never the same.  I have always been around water, paddling in it or swimming in it.  When on major rapids, paddling in very rough waters, I can remember saying to myself, “Go with the flow, just go with the flow.”  Many times the boat flipped.  There was one flip that was in a class 4 rapids when the tip was my fault.  I was paddling in the front, feeling very sure of myself and forgetting that I was not the captain of the boat.  We were paddling in a covered canoe.  We were on a river in the Northwest Territories in a remote wilderness area. Right during a major maneuver I switched to my left side thinking I would draw the boat away from a wave.  What a mistake!  Over we went with no chance to correct the error.  Once we surfaced into the angry water, all we could do was surrender to the flow.  The river was way more powerful than we were.

That surrender to the water, that fluid feeling wasn’t scary. We were in the moment and we could only surrender.  We couldn’t fight the energy of the flow of the water; we could only go with it.

There are several ways to understand surrender.  There is the surrender to the power of something else and then there is the surrender to blissful moments.  No matter when I surrender, the moment seems to be quite blissful.  I am happiest then.  Lately, I have been reminding myself of this blissful feeling and trying to surrender to it even when there is chaos around me. 

That is what happens when I paint.

Sweet sweet surrender, like a fish in the water, like a bird in the air.