Not Drowning, Singing...
Not Drowning, Singing...
Enlightenment Prompt #22
Not drowning, singing
not lost at sea, safe with friends:
just turn back to love.
Stevie Smith's poem Not Drowning But Waving is a cautionary tale. The protagonist in Not Waving but Drowning, is a ghost, complaining from the afterlife that at his moment of death he was actually drowning, not waving to friends on the shore or pretending to drown in order to get laughs.
Not Waving but Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
-Stevie Smith
The same friends thought the cold water might have played a part in his death, presumably a heart attack. The ghost tells us that the friends are wrong, that his death was as much an emotional death as a physical death.
Our ghost was too cold, too distant from life (even though he put on a good show pretending he wasn't), much further out at sea than anyone had realized, perhaps even himself. Perhaps he found life too painful, or had been hurt and hadn't managed to get back in the game for fear of being hurt again.
His drowning death is a symbolic reflection of his life.
So let’s spell out the opposite course and turn a cautionary tale into an inspirational tale. To do so is less artful and poignant than Stevie Smith's poem but sometimes it’s important to be obvious so that if we find that we've drifted away, like the character in the poem, we know in which direction to head as we try to swim back to shore.
Warm of heart, vulnerable, communicating our feelings, unshackled from fear.
Those are the shores to swim for but how to get there? Ironically, even if we feel lost at sea, we are not.
Love and life are intertwined, they’re always there, sustaining the universe. They never turn away from us, it is always we who turn and move away from them.
Turn around, the life you are mourning the loss of is right there.
Not drowning at a distance but swimming, playing and singing with loved ones on sunny shores.
