We walked slowly along the shores of Cape Cod. Cool and overcast, it was everything one imagines a Massachusetts beach to be in the late spring.
“Whoa, hey…” I don’t recall whose voice spoke up first, but all three of us noticed the same thing lying on the beach a few feet from the water’s reach.
“Jellyfish?”
And then as we knelt a bit closer, “Oh, no….that’s a squid.”
We stood in silence for a couple of moments before Eric nudged the clear jelly-ed body. Upon the nudge, one of the red arms responded with its motion.
“Whoa! Still alive.”
Eric then began nudging the squid toward the ocean with the side of his shoe. One little push. Then another. Each nudge rolled the squid just slightly, and each time the squid’s body picked up a fresh layer of sand.
We didn’t say anything, but given that this squid was still a good three feet from the ocean, our ‘slow-roll’ approach may have ended up just caking it in far too much sand before it was ever given a chance at the water.
We looked around the beach for something. A few sticks? A sand shovel left by children? There was nothing.
“Hey! I think I have a folder.” Indeed. Eric pulled an empty folder from his backpack, put it under the squid, and then stepped right to the shoreline where he lightly tossed the squid into the ocean.
Where the squid then floated.
“Oh man…is it dead?”
The tide was coming and going so frequently that it was unclear whether the squid was making its motion or if it was the tide doing everything. Or a mix?
“Well, wait...” We saw an arm move, seemingly of its own volition.
“And look! Is it getting closer to that seaweed?”
There was some kind of green growth rooted in a particular spot of the tide. If the squid were getting closer to it, it seemed to suggest that it was not just the ebb and flow of the tide moving the squid but, in fact, the squid’s power that was pressing through the current and making progress toward the deeper waters.
We watched.
The squid never quite reached the seaweed. Instead, the current began taking it sideways, which made it all the more unclear how much or how little progress was being made.
We began walking on, and I remembered the midnight conversation we had on all-the-things-in-the-headlines-these-days just sixteen hours earlier.
“I just feel so helpless.”
“It feels like we are going backward.”
“Does any of it matter? I get so anxious with the trajectory of climate change.”
At 1 am, our late-night conversation had moored anxiously upon the shores of hopelessness, and it ended when someone said, “Ok, so I am going to bed.”
We all jumped up, eager to embrace a state of unconscious renewal, perhaps stepping directly toward the metaphor we hope might be true about the rest of life.
What is sleep’s role in hope?
What if underneath all the painful, human activity unfolding in our world today, there’s a Deep Sleep of renewal? A healing born most fundamentally not from pushing and pulling, fighting and cajoling, but born in every space where Receiving unfolds?
—
I look back for the squid.
I am heartened by the fact that in one tiny corner of creation, we had done our small part to preserve life - maybe. We cannot control how long the squid was on life support or how merciful the great waves will be. It all feels quite tenuous.
We sit down for a few minutes and stare quietly at the ocean.
Perhaps, again, we intuit that as much as our anxieties and compassion can spur fresh kindness, the waves these days are such that our deepest hope for all that is on life-support depends mostly on the kind of power that rises uniquely from places of Rest, Renewal, and Receiving.
The kind of Force that doggedly presses new spring through impossible winters.
The kind of Energy that vitalizes most fully in the space of slumber.
The kind of Life that rises from even (especially?) from the grave?