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Boats
This is a blog about how experiences we have remain in our memory and can gain new and deeper meaning in our lives simply because of the gift of time. The gift of time can whisper the inexplicable Presence in ways sometimes our unresolved selves could not then hear it. What happens when we pay attention to images that resurface for us, bringing joy and peace? It’s also about finding what ways contemplation happens in our life and then being true to that by simply turning up for it, again and again, imperfectly, unresolved, still questioning and evolving, only partially understanding or partially experiencing, or even sometimes not having any felt sense of God’s love. But showing up anyway, as we are.
When I was an international student at Heidelberg University, thanks to a Rotary Scholarship, I was homesick living in a dorm in Neuenheimer Feld, and many days after classes walked the hills of that lovely city, often alone. I was 22. Almost without knowing it, I fell in love with the barges sailing up the Neckar River and down it, silently, low in the water, with mostly smooth flat tops. Pencil-thin from above, they reminded me of toy boats almost or poetry in action.
A walker since my early teenage years, escaping tumult at home, my walk then was along Philosopher’s Way. The path was across the river from the magnificent ruins of the Heidelberg Castle. At various times of daylight, below me the castle’s red sandstone looked pink as sunrise against the dark green trees. Below it, always in my peripheral vision, was the city’s Old Bridge with its matching red sandstone, elegant curves, and scalloped patterning of the placid blue water.
What made these times of solitude special is that I also walked there not alone sometimes, with Frau Sophie Buschbeck as my companion. At first, “Sie” for the formal “you,” fairly soon she said, “Call me ‘Du’ [the informal ‘you’]. And Mutti Buschbeck.” And later she said: “Call me Mutti, if you wish.” She was a widow at 79, and she’d take my arm and off we went. Climbing the hills, her head down, her saying through quick puffs of breath: “You have to stay fit. You have to have hills to go up.”
I didn’t know then that my walks could be meditation. I had no awareness of that. As I was taught then, prayer was something you did with carefully chosen words, to make yourself a better person, to help you serve others better, to note make mistakes. I was raised with a policeman in my soul. Who was my god then, little g.
I had been raised to be what was called “selfless,” to think of others and their needs first, and not to think on my self. I didn’t know yet that I needed to make space for, cultivate, appreciate, and get acquainted with my self/selves/ego so that I could one day move beyond such. I was too injured to know any of this. I hadn’t yet learned how painful that is.
I used my mind as a buffer against pain. If I kept my mind busy, I could provide some numbing against a pain I couldn’t yet name. And my mind was dyslexic, so it took up quite a lot of my time to keep it busy.
But I could walk, thankfully, in the green trees above the Neckar River. Even though I was miserable, not really consciously taking in the scenery as much as unconsciously absorbing it and being immersed in it healingly. Thankfully I did have friends there who cared for me: Mutti Buschbeck, my kind roommate Gundi, the Buschbeck family who also took me in, and others I met along the path, literally, including one kind-hearted man, a dentist from another country, who took such a liking to me that after just three walks together there he asked me to marry him. I politely declined.
Looking back, I see how much walking meditation has been my path. It has been a true gift. I didn’t plan it this way. I walked because I was lonely and I loved nature, always have. Saying walking meditation is a way to pray was not in the limited vocabulary of my dogmatic evangelical upbringing. I had no idea I was doing anything “right” by walking and in fact felt that my entire life was a failure then.
I walked the way an injured animal will often find a bush and crawl into it and try to rest and heal. Call it instinct.
That I didn’t pass the language test to get into Heidelberg University and had to take remedial German courses there was just the academic component of a much larger failure health-wise, family-wise, and in every other way. I was so not at home inside myself that even every physical step was somehow painful, yet I was given the gift of getting out and walking, even so. Alone and other times with Mutti Buschbeck.
Sometimes I picture what my life might have been like had my young self heard a guest preacher say at one of the small churches I was taken to: “So contemplation is any means you use—walking meditation, rosary, mass, a 20-minute sit—any means you use—to experience this Self. . . . [That] is for me contemplation. And don’t get hung up on the posture or the program or the procedure cause I think as there are so many personalities there’s going to be many ways to experience it.” It would be decades before I heard Richard Rohr say that.
I am still watching the boats on the Neckar River come and go silently, low in the water, pencil-thin and smooth. They do not hurry. They move with ease. They do not zig or zag. They move ahead. With spaciousness. They seem to move without moving. They taught me without teaching me, I caught from them, how calmness can be lived out.
Only much later would I learn that Thomas Keating teaches something about boats. His words gave me words for what I’d learned from the Neckar.
The River is pure consciousness. This makes sense to me because I remember in graduate school walking up to my sixth-floor room after my sister had moved on to work as a nurse, and I was alone there, and I needed to forgive someone for my own sanity, and as I went to put my key in the lock and open the non-refurbished, stained wooden door to that ramshackle, tiny, but wonderfully located apartment, I felt a r(R)iver open my heart and run through my emerging selfhood.
Boats of all sizes float down this River. I remember the barges and boats of all sizes that floated down the beautiful Neckar River, a tributary of the Rhine River, and home for many terraced vineyards. Sometimes I see myself as a diver under the River. I’m not wearing any gear. Somehow I can just breathe under water, with ease. I’m sitting on a rock there below, comfortably, a good way down, and I see the boats now going by above me, some are small, some are long and large, some are medium in size. These are my thoughts. They come and go. New ones appear.
They can be anything, any thought, any feeling. In contemplation I let the boats go by. I don’t react to them or respond to them. I remember the experience of being up on Philosopher’s Way, with the quiet boats below going to and fro along the river, that feeling of being sick, lonesome, lost, and in pain, and yet also held. What a gift.
So in contemplation I don’t leave my cozy rock, swim up, and climb onto a boat, to analyze what it’s carrying, though I may feel that I’d like to. I don’t leave my rock, swim up, climb on, and ride downstream. I let it go. I let it pass by above me.
In contemplation, I don’t engage with these, I don’t judge them. I let them go. This helps me see I’m not what I’m thinking. Space opens up to discover who I am apart from my thoughts, I discover the wonder and the love that that River holds for us.
I sit on my rock, and I notice the River all around me.
Blessings to all of you friends, and thank you for being here,
Carmen