Yesterday I stood on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in Portugal. I had just eaten a plate full of crispy-skinned sardines and a fresh salad of local tomatoes and cucumbers. Above me flew an occasional jet arriving at Faro airport full of tourists about to join me in frolicking barefoot at the foamy edges of the waves. A child kicked a ball too enthusiastically and when it hit me in the back of the leg we both laughed as I passed it back to him.
Life is good.
And yet. It is not good.
It is impossible to stand here without contemplating that on the other side of this same body of water there is no food and the aircraft above do not contain trolleys stocked with duty free perfume and little tubs of Pringles but rather two thousand pound bombs. Many children are not kicking balls, because Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees in the world. Hostages still languish in tunnels. Earlier that same day I had messaged friends further up the coast to ensure they were safe after Israel attacked Iran in the hope of damaging nuclear capacities.
As I looked at these waves that both connected and divided me from this apocalyptic destruction, I found the sound and the repetitive motion soothing. However, because I am insatiably curious, I wondered: does the water in the sea actually move from coast to coast? Was the wave I was paddling in once actually in Gaza/ Israel? I googled.
According to the Ocean Exploration Website,
Though waves do cause the surface water to move, the idea that waves are travelling bodies of water is misleading.
Waves are actually energy passing through the water, causing it to move in a circular motion. When a wave encounters a surface object, the object appears to lurch forward and upward with the wave, but then falls down and back in an orbital rotation as the wave continues by, ending up in the same position as before the wave came by. If one imagines water within a wave following this same pattern, it is easier to understand ocean waves as simply the outward manifestation of kinetic energy propagating through seawater. In reality, the water in waves doesn’t travel much at all. The only thing waves do transmit across the sea is energy….
Where does a wave's energy come from? There are a few types of ocean waves and they are generally classified by the energy source that creates them. Most common are surface waves, caused by wind blowing along the air-water interface, creating a disturbance that steadily builds as wind continues to blow and the wave crest rises. Surface waves occur constantly all over the globe, and are the waves you see at the beach under normal conditions.
This immediately reminded me of the creation myth found in the first chapter of Genesis where it says that before creation, before God started to actually make the world by declaring ‘Let there be!’, the spirit of God hovered over the waters of the deep. The Hebrew word ‘spirit’ in the text is ‘ruach’ which is often translated as wind or breath but is also used to describe a core part of our being. Whilst the word ‘nefesh’ means the literal breath that keeps us alive, ‘ruach’ is the living part of us that is comprised of emotions and desires. Suddenly this text made more sense to me. When creating, the first step before we actually make or produce a physical object is the hovering and the energetic state of making waves.
We might consider this in three connected ways:
Soothing waves
First it is no accident that waves sounds are often used in anti anxiety or sleep apps. They calm, soothe and prepare for a better state of being. Before producing an item as creators we enter a space of tension. Are our ideas any good? Will we be able to manifest them they way we want to to? Will they be received by the world as we hope? In order to create the first step is to self-soothe. Often this takes a shall-I-shan’t-I gathering of energy a moving towards then a retreating then a moving towards again, as we gather courage and determination, just as waves ebb and flow.
How do we do this? We ‘hover’. Or as some translations have it we ‘flutter’. The word used in the text for hover (רָחַף )has an old root meaning to soften. This is a time of staying in place, exercising some core muscles to not be blown away from our central desires, yet staying in a gentle state. It is a time of compassion for ourselves, reassuring ourselves that we have agency, capacity and choice, to soften our perfectionism and harsh self-expectations so that we can start to create.
Eroding Waves
Alternatively when we speak of ‘making waves’ we often mean to cause some kind of disturbance, to challenge the status quo in a destructive way. Is the text telling us that this where creation should start? Yes. But not in the sense that we create with ill intent, with the purpose of maiming and harming. The waves that cause harm such as tsunamis and surges are not caused by this hovering process but by more active, angry storms or submarine landslides and earthquakes. Those waves happen after the action not in this pre-action before creation stage.
Yet all waves erode in some way. That how we get beautiful beaches and dramatic coastlines, how dynamic sediment redistribution happens and geological strata are revealed which help scientific discovery. Yet they do it softly, over time. The key to understanding why we should embrace this kind of wave making is to look at the context. In the text the hovering is happening in the void and confusion, over the unformed deep. The first stage of creation is to gently lap away at the darkness in our mind and soul so that we are ready to declare ‘Let it be’.
If we are talking about the fact of making an object, we may be talking about gradually eroding mindsets such as perfectionism of self-doubt. We may need to disturb our belief that we are not good enough, that there is no place in the world for our creations, that bad reviews of previous work mean we should stop making.
In the context of politics, if we wish to create a better world we need to break down the belief that our individual contribution to the whole endeavour is insignificant and pointless. We need to rub away at the prevailing narratives that declare hope has been destroyed or that nothing can possibly improve for generations. We need not to turn away from the ‘tohu and bohu’, the confusion, chaos and disorder in despair, unable to contemplate anything changing, but to hover over it with softness, fluttering now but then moving to the declarative creative words ‘Let there be!’
Waves of intention
The website Sefaria let you easily access many different translations of this myth. Some are literal and some combine the actual brief words of the text with later (but still ancient) interpretations. One of these the Kehot Chumash links spirit with intention as well as desire when it says
when the earth was astonishingly void, with darkness over the surface of the abyss, i.e., the water, and God’s spirit, i.e., His intention to make the world into His home, hovered over the surface of the water, ready to initiate this process –
The time of hovering is when we make our choices about our intentions which will permeate every step of the creative process. We choose not only what we erode with our initial waves but what impact we intend our ultimate creations will have.
Of course, it is always the case that how our work is used or interpreted it’s not necessarily the way that we intend. I discovered, for example that the Hebrew for ‘hover’ in this context shares its root - understandably- with the modern word for ‘multicopter drone’. Whoever invited that technology created a tool which has since been taken by others to use in different ways both for humanitarian work across a variety of conflict zones and for the purposes of prosecuting war by surveillance and sleep disturbance.
However, we choose our own intentions for our creativity and how it enters the world the moment we send it out. In the text even God makes that choice. The Rashi translation refers to God
first intending to create the world with the attribute of justice but then granting precedence to the attribute of mercy…seeing that the world could not otherwise endure
We are not responsible, for the choices of others who misuse our work but only for our own intentions. Which includes the intention of not speaking out or up without work whether from fear, hopelessness or sense of lack of entitlement or any other block. It doesn’t have to be Gaza you use your talents for - there are so many issues in the world that your talents can be applied to directly or tangentially, but, along side the efforts of others, you can make a difference to the cause that calls you.
Hovering is not necessarily a time of procrastination then but a time of preparation, of chipping away at mental obstacles and of carefully considering our intentions. It is a time to trust that what we can do counts. If we were given talents which have obvious direct relevance to a need such as the abilities of the reconstructive surgeons who are doing amazing work in Gaza then we should intend to use those for good. But if we were given the gift of being writers, painters, photographers or other creative processes, then hovering is the time when we can consider how we too can play a part - even a tiny one - directly or in support of others, and can remind ourselves that we too were created ‘for such a time as this’. Every contribution to repairing the world made with the intention of mercy and reconstruction counts.
L’shalom,
Helen
For one that is hovering at the moment, this was very helpful, thank you Helen.
This was so very timely and inspiring, thank you so much for writing and sharing it. I have passed it on so your words can inspire others x