Letting Go and the Symmetry of Canoes

On Friday I sold my canoe. The last time we had it in the water was the summer of, maybe, 2005. Since then it’s been in the backyard, covered with a decaying plastic tarp. It needed some minor repairs to make it usable and a lot of work to bring it back to its original luster.

Each spring I’d think, This year I’m going to fix it up and take it out on the water, but it never happened. I had neither the room nor the inclination. It was a beautiful boat, and I enjoyed the looks I’d get while driving down the road with it lashed to the top of my car. And I really enjoyed it when people would ask where I got it and I was able to say I built it myself.

It took me a year and a half to build (not straight through, there were weeks when I didn’t touch it). I finished it in the early fall of 1999. I took the picture on September 22, the first time it touched water. Up until that moment, I had my doubts it would float.

I built it for two reasons. I had another canoe, also one that I’d built, but it was much heavier. It took two people to get it on and off the car. A solitary person, I liked, at the time, going out alone. This was before I’d met Robin, whose company I’m glad to have anytime. During that lifetime, when I built my canoe, I often desired solitude.

My other reason for building it was much more complex. A couple of years prior, I found myself spiritually adrift. The faith I was raised with had slowly eroded until, finally, there was nothing of it left for me. I was desperate for spiritual direction. At about the same time, a 10-year stint as an author of how-to books had come to a close. I nurtured the idea of writing a book about some aspect of my spiritual dilemma, but I couldn’t figure out where to go with it.

Back then, I carried around the concept of “spiritual journey.” I was on a journey of discovery, finding myself and all that. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination was the mantra of the day. Looking back, it seems so, well, silly. It’s been years since I’ve considered the journey metaphor viable. The destination is important.

Back then, though, I had this idea that a canoe – not the boat itself, but the building of it – could be a vehicle for a book, a spiritual book of my journey.

It never happened. Perhaps it wasn’t the journey after all that mattered. But I do feel that having sold my boat, I have arrived at a new beginning. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, the day after I watched it leaving on the top of someone else’s car.

Olallie Lake, Summer 2002

Although I never wrote the book (read the essay), I did use it often in its early life. I took it out alone many times, usually to the many lakes on Sauvie Island. My daughter Kathryn and I would take it on our once-annual camping trips together. It was she who took the picture of my boat and me on the shore of Olallie Lake. And Robin and I had some very pleasant paddles together.

Not all canoes are alike. Some are made for whitewater, others for flat water (small lakes and slow-moving streams). Mine was a flat-water canoe. Whitewater canoeing is exhilarating, sure, but I prefer the placid nature of still water. Besides, I’m not much of a risk taker – at least with my physical being.

Except for the arrangements of the two seats, my canoe was the same end to end. If there were two people in the boat, we’d paddle it one direction. When by myself, I’d paddle it in the other direction (placing my weight closer to the center). Either end could be the front, depending on the circumstances. I loved the symmetry of it all.

And this is why I had no trouble letting the boat go. Not only had it had served it’s purpose (solitude when I needed it), I had reached the end of one journey to find myself at the beginning of another.

In Buddhism there is the metaphor of the raft. The Buddha compares his teachings, the Dhamma, to a raft used to take one to the far shore (of liberation). Once there, he says, one doesn’t carry the raft on one’s back. Rather, one leaves it behind as it is of no more use.

On Friday, I am traveling with several others to Abhayagiri Monastery for the annual Upasika Renewal weekend. An upasika/upasaka (feminine/masculine versions) is a Buddhist lay person who joins with monastics in Dhamma practice. This will be my first visit to Abhyagiri as an upasaka or otherwise. I’ve been practicing Buddhism for more than a dozen years, but now it seems I’m bringing it to another level.

It’s fitting to have put aside the canoe – once a symbol of my spirituality – at this time in my life. It’s not that it went without a sense of loss. Robin and Kathryn both have pleasant memories of paddling with me (and I with them, to be sure). Today, as I was writing this, Kathryn burst into my room. “You sold the canoe!?” She had been away for the past couple of days and, because I hadn’t told her of my plans, it came as a surprise. She sniffed and took her complaint to Robin, who agreed that it was a bit of a shock. “I didn’t even get to say good-bye,” Robin had said when she came home Friday after the fact.

I regret having caused them to suffer the loss, but it was time for me to put it down. I have no regrets about that.