02-Mum-Aitutaki-106-panel-200pxI sometimes wonder what it is about sailing that pulls me back, again and again into the discomfort of clambering over life lines, stewing around in a poky galley, tossing through the night in an uncomfortable roll, hours and hours lost in the froth that rushes past. Is it the sea, calling out to her saltiness in me, the fluids in my body, responding like the tides to the moon, to the gravity of her love. Is she in love with me, as herself separated out, calling me to remember that I am with her, under my skin?

She is the great mother of all life on this planet. Sailing, I can feel our relationship, in the shuffle of bone, wobble of flesh, skittish horizon, not thought about, no distance between us now, micro muscular adjusting to the gravitational imperative, no solid ground now, queasy stomach, distress, uncomfortably unfamiliar until something in me finally lets go, and I am set free into her eternal fluxing. I would be terrified of her power, and inscrutable lack of meaning, if it mattered that I stand alone, but it doesn’t when I am sailing.

I sit out in the cockpit, nothing much to do but notice the motion of the sea intimately caressing me, washing through my thoughts and tossing them overboard, no life buoy to save them. How quickly this thinking becomes irrelevant. Softening into a friendly relationship with myself.

Because at sea I am different somehow, nothing to distract me, nothing much else to do, but to live in this shaky blubbery jelly-like form, letting go into the motion of the boat coursing through the waves, sighing, relaxing, shaking out the motorway and the office, given up just for now to the rolling, choppy confusion. Do I remember slipping around in the womb like this, aligned to the fundamental ebb and flow of water, patterning my life, back then and now?

These spiritual musings — and many more — are detailed in Dyana’s Anchors in an Open Sea trilogy, beginning with book 1: The Yoga of Sailing.

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