Log Rolling

It's time for a good, old-fashioned log rolling story.

There's a beautiful river that wraps around my mother's house in North Carolina. Every now and then, after heavy rains, large logs and debris will get carried downstream. When the river ebbs, they plop wherever they end up and wait for the next big rain. 

About a year ago, ten large sections of a tree trunk got stuck in the rapids and blocked the flow. I decided, with supervision, to get in and see what I could do. On land, these hunks of wood weigh hundreds of pounds. In the river, they could be guided with a little nudge. It wasn't always simple. Some were beached and would take some wrestling. But the moment you jostled it into the right spot, the current would swell around it and off it went. It was so rewarding watching the logs roll, splash, and get carried away. Some were too heavy; others too risky in a slippery, ice-cold river with strong currents. I let them be, knowing the rains would come in good time. 

I'm a big fan of allowing nature to take its course. But I've also recognized that I can help expedite the process. The same can be said of our own evolution. The first step is to stop resisting. That's what we're doing with our practice: learning how to take it as it comes. The more we find ourselves moving in the direction of evolution, the more we can have a say in how we evolve. With less stress, finer levels of feeling, and enhanced perception, we're able to detect the most frictionless path forward. We don't need to wait for a course correction, we're able to correct the course.