As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
I learned to float the way most children learn: my mother supported me in the water, her hands spread under my stiffened back, and I attempted, generally in vain, to relax. It’s hard to believe water will hold you up. It’s hard not to imagine that if you’re released, you’ll sink like a stone. But, after a certain amount of flailing and sputtering, it happened. Quietly, after my repeated requests not to let me go, she let me go, and the water bore me.
The first three lines of “The Avowal,” a poem Levertov wrote shortly after her 1989 conversion to Catholicism, awaken that visceral memory—the edge of fear, the curiosity, the little flickers of daring, and the lasting lesson about full-bodied trust. Floating, as much as any early experience I remember, taught me about trust. Though I climbed a challenging tree now and then, and worked up some speed on my roller skates, I wasn’t a particularly daring child. I’d try things, but it helped to have plentiful reassurance beforehand, and a back-up crew. So when the moment came to lie face to the sky and let the water bear me, I was exhilarated, and, somehow, my heart opened a little wider. Here was one more thing I could afford not to be anxious about. It was a moment of learning about faith.
It’s not only trusting the water and the buoyancy of the body but facing the sky that makes that first experience of floating epiphanic. In the same way, I loved to lie in the grass, looking up at the sky, day or—when allowed—night. The vastness, the unimaginable distance of light years, the news that the visible starlight was old, from stars that might already have gone out—all these and the sense of my own incomprehensible smallness in the scheme of things brought me to the edge of mystery, or what one physicist called “radical amazement.” Awe and fear are close neighbors. My brother, an amateur astronomer even at a tender age, used to recite facts that involved large numbers in powers of ten, assure me that there were meteors and meteorites on their way toward earth, and then drift off to sleep at night, leaving me to lie awake, wondering how to live with this unsettling information.
To lie face to the sky on water, I have learned, is to place oneself right at the riparian edge between heaven and earth, and discover how precarious and precious life on that edge is.
The poem makes no statement about that experience, except to let it hang, a suspended simile that continues to pique the reader’s imagination while it turns to another image: hawks resting on air that sustains them. Hawks aren’t altogether unusual where we live—not as rare a sight as eagles or condors or even red-winged blackbirds—but still arresting enough to make one pause and watch when they hover, scanning for prey, or fall in what poet Ted Olson unforgettably termed a “perilous, lovely way . . . down the long hill of wind. . . .” I imagine a lot of small muscles are involved even in that falling, and certainly in the way hawks “rest upon air.” Like all good predators, they remain alert even in repose, and ready. But to see them high above us, going nowhere, knowing the wind the way an ocean swimmer knows the tide, the way a mole knows the soil or a singer the feel of middle C, is humbling and thrilling. The sight awakens a longing that’s hard to name. I’d like to rest like that, in the very midst of things. I’d like to dare to do that.
Five lines into the poem, we have only introductory clauses. It is not yet a sentence, but hovers the way the images do, in no hurry to name the desire those images evoke. Then it comes: “So would I learn to attain / freefall and float / into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace. . . .” I read the words for the first time with a shock of recognition. I have since seen that same look of sudden knowing on students’ or friends’ faces when I share the poem. “Yes,” we say to ourselves or each other, “that’s it.” We want to trust like that. We want to let go of anxiety, hypervigilance, self-scrutiny, timidity, goals, and agendas and totally entrust ourselves.
Perhaps the most striking word in the poem is “attain.” It drives right to the paradox every good coach knows—that the deep relaxation and readiness the best athletes achieve is hard-won, a product of rigorous training and sustained, self-correcting humility. Most of us don’t learn to float easily, or to hang-glide (ever) or surf or dance on a stage or improvise a speech or act on a hunch we suspect is divine guidance. “Just relax into it,” one coach told me, again and again. And I say it to students who hover, paralyzed, over keyboards and empty screens, dreading the first sentence. And then we work on relaxing.
And so I imagine that miraculous moment of floating “into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,” not needing to know how deep I might go, not clinging to what I find hardest to let go. There are moments in prayer when you know you are held and loved, when words give way to wordlessness and Presence is utterly sufficient. They are precious. And they are—as Levertov reminds us in the final line, as she eases us onto solid doctrine—unearned, a pure gift of pure love poured out even upon those so slow and reluctant to trust, available as soon as we let go, even as we sputter, like the child in the pool, “Don’t let go.”