Groundlessness

Part 6: Walking on water

So. This series has wandered all over the place. I’ve been writing not as an academe filling in a finished outline. Instead, as a pilgrim who takes each next step, puts his foot down, and looks around. There is no goal except to keep walking.

I wrote once about my practice of finding where the physical sensations of both anxiety and stability settle in my body. Every person has their own body sense of where they experience these emotions the most. For me it is at the solar plexus, that point right at the lower end of the sternum. The place where the fixed structure of the skeleton opens to the vulnerable living organisms of the stomach and guts, the genitals, and the organs of elimination.

That is where for me I find that porthole in Sugimoto’s “Time’s Arrow.” The point where I cling to illusory safety. The point where I open to the vital vulnerability of ever-changing mortal life.

As has become obvious from the previous episodes of this unexpected story, no engaged conversation with “the enemy,” no crossing of the empathy wall, is easy. What is most to the point, it is my own usually unacknowledged cravings and repulsions that keep me from choosing vulnerability.

That is what keeps me behind my own porthole. I don’t know what’s out there. I do know it’s completely beyond my control, even beyond the possibility of anticipating. I don’t know if I can survive. In fact, I know that ultimately I won’t survive.

Pema Chödrön writes:

To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity. We train in staying with the soft spot and use our biases as stepping-stones for connecting with the confusion of others.

Strong emotions are useful in this regard. Whatever arises, no matter how bad it feels, can be used to extend our kinship to others who suffer the same kind of aggression or craving—who, just like us, get hooked by hope and fear.

This is how we come to appreciate that everyone’s in the same boat. We all desperately need more insight into what leads to happiness and what leads to pain.

There’s a story I told in “Sharing table fellowship” (5/16/2025). My husband and I visited Worcester, MA, in October 2019 to decide if we wanted to move here. We stayed at a bed and breakfast whose host and breakfast chef was a garrulous native in his 60s or thereabouts. We spent several friendly mornings chatting with him about housebuilding, New England curiosities, and so on.

On the fourth morning, though, he startled us by asking what we thought of “Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown.” The previous day, House Speaker Pelosi had stood up during a foreign policy meeting, pointed at President Trump, and confronted him directly. Jim and I responded to our host’s question with silence.

After an awkward minute or so, he dropped the subject and found a more mundane topic. I wonder, had I been more mature in my practice, what could have happened had I asked him kindly what troubled him most about the Speaker’s words. I’ve no idea where this might have gone.

In the least it would have been an invitation to him to become himself in the presence of relatively safe, if uncomfortable, strangers. Perhaps we three might even have glimpsed some common ground. Not in ideology or rhetoric, perhaps, but in the real world of shared personal concerns that feeds such disagreements.

“People walking on water,” by Chris Barbalis (6/24/2016)

In many steps of my pilgrimage, I’ve struggled with having failed to “control my feelings” in response to painful emotions. Sometimes, though, I have managed to stand still and look around long enough to see something forgotten within myself. When this happens, I am reminded that I am in the same boat with everyone else.

Back in a February post I revisited the tale of Jesus walking across the stormy Sea of Galilee toward the boat of his disciples [see Note]. Seeing him, they fear that they are seeing a ghost, but he calls to them that it was he. Peter longs to go to his teacher. He asks Jesus to call him to come, and Jesus does so.

Peter, steps out and began to walk. However, as he thinks about what he is doing he begins to sink. "Lord, save me!" Stretching out a hand to help Peter continue walking on water, Jesus says, “You of little faith, why did you waver?”

As I wrote in February, usually this story is told as if Jesus were scolding Peter. I read it differently, as Jesus reassuring Peter.

“You know you can do this,” Jesus says, “because you just did it. Try again.”

We are all of us confronted daily with the chaos, the changeability, the impermanence, the groundlessness of the world around us. As mortal beings it is quite natural for us to feel and yield to fear and confusion.

And yet, we each have the innate ability to accept groundlessness as our normal state of being—and to keep on walking.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

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Note: Matthew 14:25-31 (David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation):

²⁵And in the fourth watch of the night he came toward them, walking upon the sea. ²⁶And the disciples, seeing him walking upon the sea, were disturbed, saying, "It is a phantom," and they cried out in fear. ²⁷But at once he spoke to them, saying, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."

²⁸And, answering him, Peter said, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you upon the waters." ²⁹And he said, “Come.” And descending from the boat Peter walked on the waters and came toward Jesus. ³⁰But seeing the blowing wind he was afraid and, beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, "Lord, save me!" ³¹And, immediately stretching out a hand, Jesus took hold of him and says, “You of little faith, why did you waver?"

Image source:

“People walking on water,” Floating Piers, Sulzano, Art Opera Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Italy, by Chris Barbalis (6/24/2016) [Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication].