Being

In your moment of being swept along by the torrent of fate, beyond your own control

Scripture

Hidden reefs are sawing; the water-body is tearing.

Where the obstruction is, there the old wound lies.

The cut is splitting; the blood-road is racing.

Being is cutting, is healing; being is aching, is weaving.

The stubborn knot is being worked; the broken palm is gripping.

Wenzi · On Being

You have been swept in. Not by walking in—by a sudden surging torrent, without any defense. The water is no longer a gentle carrier; it has become a violent force. You cannot swim; you can only drift with the current. Your body is fiercely rubbed and torn by invisible reefs (hidden reefs are sawing; the water-body is tearing). With every collision, you feel old wounds being ripped open again (where the obstruction is, there the old wound lies).

“The cut is splitting; the blood-road is racing.” New cuts are being opened (the cut is splitting), while a road opened by hot blood is racing forward (the blood-road is racing). You are at once experiencing “cutting” and “healing,” “aching” and “weaving” (being is cutting, is healing; being is aching, is weaving). Destruction and rebirth are happening in sync within the torrent.

Do not strain desperately to swim for the bank.

That will only exhaust you, and smash you to pieces on the rocks.

Try something counter-intuitive:

In the tumbling of being swept along, stretch out your four limbs as far as you can.

Feel it: how the current pushes against your chest from the front, how it tears at your arms from the side, how it tries to twist you into the shape it wants. Let the water pass through your fingers, crash against your chest.

Go and become part of the current, instead of its enemy.

“The stubborn knot is being worked; the broken palm is gripping.”

In collision after collision, you feel that some tightly gripping thought about “self-control,” like a palm, is being shattered by the current. And at the instant of shattering, a deeper realization grows from the broken wrist—the rushing water itself becomes your new, formless “palm,” gripping the veins of this fate.

You will find that those “stubborn knots” blocking you (the stubborn knot) are being pressured and loosened in this fierce friction (being worked). And a feeling rises: as if even when a palm is struck off by the current, the broken palm will, in another way, tightly “grip” the essence of this rushing (the broken palm is gripping). Giving up control, you have instead gained a deeper fitting.

The torrent has not stopped, but your terror begins to ebb. You are no longer a piece of driftwood being abused. You are part of the energy of this torrent itself, the sharp edge that breaks through resistance, the snow-white spray thrown up when water meets rock. The pain still exists, but it has become the scale by which you feel your own strength and existence. You are not the victim of fate—you are one of fate’s wild, direct, brooking-no-argument ways of expressing itself. Being-Torrent: you are not a swept leaf—you are that sharp water by which the torrent carves the land and opens its channel.