finding your point

This morning early I went out for a row in a single. My friend Liz and I had San Quentin Point as our goal; once we got there and back, coffee and breakfast!

I have not done a huge amount of single rowing, so I had to keep turning around to assure myself I wasn't heading into the shore or a piling or a dock. As we got out into the ferry channel, I started looking for my point. In rowing, finding your point means finding a fixed object; if you keep that object directly in line with your stern, you presumably will go straight (and not hit the aforementioned objects!) I don't know the course very well, so I would row about twenty strokes on a particular point, turn around and check, re-orient my point and go ahead another twenty. The water was smooth, the sun warm, the ferries absent. Perfect rowing contemplative time. And lots of points to find.

Out by San Quentin,  I thought of the Gospel story where Jesus says ":no one who puts their hand to the plow and looks back will make it to heaven." The traditional way of interpreting that is that if you are looking one way, you can't go straight the other way...in other words, looking backwards at the plow will not allow for a straight furrow. Or again, you can't go in the way you want to go if you are looking the other way.

And so as I found my point behind me and pulled on my oars to shoot my boat forward, I pondered this teaching. It's all about congruence; we can go straight, towards where we are desiring to go, when we know the source, the Source, of our guidance. When we have the point off our stern deck, right in front of us.

 And it is also about practice; we find the source of our guidance, and because of changes in weather, or current, or other things, we sometimes have to stop, make an adjustment to re-orient ourselves, and start up again. As the great spiritual teachers say, interruptions in our spiritual practices are so good because they give us the opportunity to try again, one more time, start anew and, for the love of God, practice again.

I'm grateful today to God, my source, for the many points I found this morning, in the beauty of creation on San Francisco Bay. And for delicious coffee and coffee with the rowers afterwards.

finding my point under the bridges was, well, challenging!