Knowing Your Element

I was walking with a friend around Vancouver’s Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park the other day. She was struggling with a major life decision, one that stood to unravel a large part of the public life she’d built if she let go and followed her heart.

I’d felt good about having chosen the lagoon as the setting for our walk. Water soothes and clarifies in ways that pass beyond understanding. The American poet Wallace Stevens would have agreed with my choice: “Sometimes,” he said, “the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.”

Arriving at the lagoon we found two juvenile swans resting and preening their feathers on the grassy shore. Calm and elegant, they basked contentedly in the waning sun.

Suddenly, from down the beach, a young chocolate lab came hurtling into the scene. Barking excitedly, he intercepted them before they could reach the safety of water, driving them up the grassy slope and away from the water. Panicked and out of their element, the distressed birds lurched and flapped and stumbled, snapping in vain at their more agile opponent.

The spectacle came to a rapid close when the dog’s red-faced owner burst into view with toddler in tow. With the dog quickly leashed, the geese wobbled gratefully back to the water where they sped off with impressive grace and speed.

I didn’t think much of the event at the time. It must have made a deep impression on my friend, though. She called me later that evening to say she finally realized what she needed to do for herself.

“I need to do what those swans did,” she said. “Did you see how easily they started to move again once they got back into the water? I need to get back to my own natural element too, the one where I truly belong.”

That reminded me of a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Swan’.

The Swan

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

Rilke’s poem is about the journey we are all on. It is one that will require us to let go again and again in order to begin anew.

What is the ground that you stand on and cling to every day?

Where is the element where you truly belong?

Find your element with Adrian. Contact him about his outdoor counselling services in Vancouver.