Here

Foundering, and found

There's a thing about maps that I keep coming back to.

The map is a layer separate from the reality that it describes. A conceptual model. The points and lines and shapes on it are abstractions, representations; not the thing itself, but something about the thing.

Good maps have lots of detail, and often many layers of their own. Contours and places and trails and junctions. Labels and names.

Pick up a map of your region and shake it unfurled, and lay it down on the ground. There's one point on the map that's in the place it describes. The map and the territory coincide. That place has a name: "Here".

We're spoiled nowadays with electronic maps that have a GPS push-pin that represents "you are here", but that push-pin is just an abstraction (it's on the map). The actual place is (exactly where the map says it is) here. You can push a pin right through the map into the place that it labels!

Tonight I heard this poem: "Lost", by David Wagoner:

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.

And I was reminded of the sauna last night.

I sat in the sauna and sweated for half an hour. Then it was time to dunk in the pool. So I walked out on the mushy icy steps, and at the edge of the pool had a sudden small feeling that I was at "the place of the pool": this pool belongs right here. There was moonlight, and snow, and a spring that rises from the foot of the hill, and the water. There was a breeze moving the air, and leaves below the surface. This is the magical place of the pool.

Then I stepped in.

There's a shock of cold, and a determinedly walking several steps further in, then kneeling to get water over my shoulders, then shivering tingling cold. But there's another important step that I try to practice after entering the pool, which is to relax into it and let go and feel what happens next. Relaxing can make it possible to go beyond the surface chill, and let it be deeper; to feel what happens in my core; to watch with interest.

Foundering: to fill with water and sink. To last a few seconds longer in the cold.

This seems like a way to find the place and "treat it as a powerful stranger". Asking my body for permission to know how the water feels, and what it has to say.

So my little sauna practice is: ask for permission to be known in this place, by this place, and to feel it.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.