This is the phrase that comes, soft and repetitive as a mantra, as I put my feet in the icy ocean water on Thursday.  “Leave Your Mooring.”  My feet are numb in minutes, and I wonder how I’ll get in with a surfboard in a couple of weeks if I decide to join my instructor for a few days’ refresher.  “Leave Your Mooring.”  Waves slap my shins and my breathing coincides with the movement of the sea.  In and out, in and out, slow and sure, unthinking- just doing.  My counselor’s recent words echo in my ears curled up with nautilus salt sounds: “Wherever you go, you will be okay, but you must leave the dock.  Just go, start out, and wherever you end up will be all right.  It will be Right.”  Untie The Ropes.  I don’t even have to start the motor, right?  No paddles necessary yet- I’m not that brave.   Just Untie The Ropes and begin to move.  Right now- and for the past seven-point-five years-  I have not moved.

The frustration this moment is that I know this is my own 21st century version of Jacob wrestling with God.  Remember the story?  (Genesis 32)  This is a low point in Jacob’s life.  He fears his brother, Esau, possibly coming to kill him, so he stays alone on one side of a stream while sending his family to camp on the other.  He has nowhere left to turn.  In the night, a man comes and Jacob wrestles with him.  It is historically suggested that this “man” is actually God.  Jacob must put up quite a fight, because it is daybreak when God finally dislocates his hip (leaving a permanent limp in some versions) and still Jacob won’t let go.  Jacob demands a blessing.  I like to think, from what I know of Jacob, that this is his absolute moment of surrender.  (He certainly deserves one, my judgmental brain thinks!)  He cannot go on without the Blessing, and Spirit gives it as soon as he asks.  His name is changed on the spot from Jacob, meaning “cheater,” to Israel, which means “he strives with God,” or “upright with God.”  He has made it through the dark night- metaphorically and literally- and he awakens on the other side of the stream, which has a whole new meaning now.

I love this story.  I love to think that in one fell swoop, in a matter of a few hours, God could sashay down from on high and give me a lickin’ that will adjust me to proper tickin’!  The part of me that is tired of constant striving- like the diet that just won’t yield the desired results- would embrace even a few days of such a tussle.  Truthfully, it just continues to be a process for me, but with some subtle changes of late.  There are messages I cannot ignore.  There are realities pressing in that threaten the integrity of my deepest Self.  I must act, or perhaps face years of denying what is Truth, and this will wither me.  Perhaps my hip has been touched and I am limping slightly, and I am finally ready for the face-to-face.  The alternative is unthinkable, finally.  Leave Your Mooring.  Something has to change.  I must be braver than I have been, and trust that I will be fed wherever I am led.  Heck, I just have to trust I will be LED.  Because I will.  I know this in my inmost places.  I am just biding my time in KNOWING, instead of ACTING it so.

To re-phrase the Byrds’ lovely lyric:  there is a time to read so many, many spiritual books; a time to listen; a time to write and fold the papers and put them away; and a time to take them out, polish them up, and send them off.  There is a time to put all that you know into practice.  To not pull out any more resources to see what they suggest about what to do next.  You see, your Deepest Self already knows Truth.  She has written it from the beginning of time, abides with it outside the realms of time and space, and speaks it even now.  Just trust.  And Leave Your Mooring.  Now.

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