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I was happy to get a kayak back in the water on Monday, checking out Estero Americano for the first time, after over a year of no paddling at all. It took a silly amount of will for me to get over my fear and reluctance to make the effort, even knowing it would all be worth it. And it was.

I’m reading The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram. It’s been a long hard slog through this book, but I’m in a good section now, and am struck by this passage:

For the Navajo, then, the Air—particularly in its capacity to provide awareness, thought, and speech—has properties that European, alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an interior, individual human “mind” or “psyche.” Yet by attributing these powers to the Air, and by insisting that the “Winds within us” are thoroughly continuous with the Wind at large—with the invisible medium in which we are immersed—the Navajo elders suggest that that which we call the “mind” is not ours, is not a human possession. Rather, mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans—like all other beings—participate. One’s individual awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through and around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligences is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.

On the water, I try to feel that. Can I break through the wall of my own thoughts, into the air around me? I have had those feelings of oneness with nature; usually, animals are involved, perhaps with a hawk with a broken wing or with an elk who shakes his antlers at me. But the feeling is fleeting. I can’t summon it up at will.

I’ve been hearing people talk about how their god or their higher power loves them. And as I paddle along, I think about this. Do I feel loved by my higher power? I dig deep for the feeling, but I find that it’s not there for me, at least not now. I’m not terribly bothered by this, but I do wonder what they are experiencing. I have a kernel of worry that maybe it’s something I need to be able feel so I don’t keep trying to make gods out of men and then seek their love.

My father spends our conversation on father’s day bemoaning my lapsed Catholism; I finally reveal to him that it’s worse than he thought…that I’m not only a non-church goer, but I’m a Buddhist, too. I finally, finally understand that he will never accept who I am. But I am quicker to understand that it is easier for me to feel compassion for a mere mortal than it is for me to have compassion for a god. He asks me to say an “Our Father”, and I don’t have the heart to tell him how often I find myself holding hands in a circle saying that already…or how that “father” part of that grates on me when I do.

The wind picks up, pushes me and the ‘yak forward, and I remember the Navajo concept of a mind as wind. I imagine that I am in my place here on the estero, breathing in and breathing out, breath mingling with the breaths of the doe with two spotted fawns under the tree, or the cries of the raven chasing the eagle who rolls to threaten the raven with its feathered talons. The air envelops me as I move through it and it also moves through me as I breathe; it accepts me and I it. Is this being loved? More questions. Always with the questions.

I put the paddle down, drag my fingers in the water as it passes through the estero and out to the ocean. I breath in and out, and I dangle my fingers, and I really am connected, via air and water, to everything else breathing this air and touching this water. What would it feel like to be loved back by it all? What am I expecting? Is it already here?

My stubborn head always gets in the way. Cut it off and set it down beside me in the water; I should have brought a rope to tow it with, let the fish nibble at it along the way. And turn my mind over to the lovely wind.