THE OCEAN AND THE WAVES

Both Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist mystic and teacher, and Lawrence Kushner, Jewish mystic and teacher, use the image of the ocean and the waves to reflect on the relationship of the human and spiritual, the big and the small, the connectivity of all things. It is a compelling, humbling and helpful image.

The wave and the ocean are both made of water. They are both elemental in this sense. They both exist in and of water. Yet they are not the same.

The waves live and move and have their being in water. They are temporary. They are fleeting. They are energy and movement and life. One can see them on the surface of the water, sometimes breaking open the thin skin of covering to reveal the white essence just below its motion. Sometimes rolling almost imperceptibly across the surface to create but a ripple at the shore.

The ocean, while also water, is not just the waves on the surface, but is The Beneath, The Under and The Before of the waves. It is the Ground of Being, the Fount of Livingness, the Great All from which the waves emerge. It is Before Life and is Life. It is under all things. It, too, moves and lives at a much deeper level. In its depths live creatures unknown on the surface of waves. Its currents move to deeper rhythms. Its secrets are buried in darkness, caverns as deep as mountains are high.

And wave and ocean are deeply connected. For each water is the essence. At the intersection of ocean and atmosphere the wave is connectivity. Breathing the wind above, feeling the current beneath, responding to heavenly signals from lunar mysteries, the wave begins, rolls and breaks, relentlessly, persistently, inevitably. Rolling, breaking water bubbling up from below and crashing open in mindful, life-giving cycle of birth/death/resurrection.

If we are waves on the ocean of nirvana, we are connected to the water inextricably. If we are waves moving at the moonstruck rhythms, we are connected to the stars. If we are waves individually and generationally called into time and space for awhile, we are connected with one another on the surface of history, and deeply beneath in the ocean of being from which we have emerged, to which we return and in which we now exist.

May we know our life as waves. May we be mindful of the ocean in which we live. May we honor the water of wave and ocean.

P Moe
12/06/05