The science of yoga claims that all experience is a combination of the qualities of the five elements — earth, water, fire air and space. We know the world and ourselves as the ever-changing fluxing of these elements.
Water, the sea, the rolling fluidity of life, glassy, troubled, playful, cool and impenetrable, something steady and unsteady, always moving, flowing, something that is always playing with the wind, dancing with the sunlight, carrying us on her back, rolling and turning, until I know for sure I am this rolling, steadily unsteady inside me.
We watch the sea carefully so we might know her moods. Is there any mood in me that is not displayed by her. When is the sea in love with the sun, in love with our boat, in love with us? How would I know.
It feels all these connections. It is totally responsive to our movement through the water. Making way, tossing us about, rolling us over, making love in every slap against the hull. Do we need mental activity to make a claim for love, connection, responsiveness? Of course not. As much as I can be present to all her changing moods, I can be alive to these ripples and movements and fluxes in me.
Responsiveness — when thinking and is out of the way, my infinitely responsive body can engage with this dance of life and know itself. The human imperative is to know, rather than fix. The elements show us to ourselves, our possibilities. We are essentially unfixed, ever-changing, fluxing. The mind fixes, yet life unravels and returns us to the dance.
The Sea holds all its moods steadily, the great container, the matrix of all the fermenting of life.
These intuitions into life and learning — and many more — are detailed in Dyana’s Anchors in an Open Sea trilogy, beginning with book 1: The Yoga of Sailing.
