You Don't Always Get What You Want ....

... But if you try sometime, you just might find

You get what you need. - Rolling Stones

     When I was young, I was ambivalent about this song by the Rolling Stones.  I never could understand why we couldn't get what we wanted, especially if it didn't hurt anyone.  Of course things were a bit more black and white for me back then, direct cause and effect the rule of the day.  Chaos theory hadn't found it's way into popular culture yet.  We hadn't heard of that apocryphal butterfly in the Sahara causing a hurricane on the other side of the world.  Maybe the world wasn't simple, but I sure thought it was.  In those days I focused on what I wanted and never wavered.  And not getting what I wanted, well that was second best, at best, and who could be happy with sloppy seconds?

     Age taught me compromise and adaptation, but I'm ashamed to admit that every now and again, even as my head grew grayer, my heart still set itself on something and there was no appeasing it but for the getting of it.  I found the intensity of my grieving at 48 over was as strong as 18.  I even broke my own heart over a man who proved with his good-bye that he was not the sweet, true soul I thought him to be.  The words passed my lips on finding out I had been suffering heart attacks?  "Damn, he really did break my heart," although, in all honesty, I did much of the breaking myself.  God how I wanted what I wanted, my happily ever after with that man.  No other would do.  He was perfect.  My one and only.  And as time went on, I found my way to a kind of grudging acceptance but never grace.

     It was a year or so after my heart surgery that I finally found forgiveness.  I let go of that particular dream and accepted, truly accepted, that we don't always get what we want.  But I hadn't gotten to the point of believing that if we're lucky, we get what we need.  It was in the midst of getting on with my life, a full-time, year long effort, that life gave me a gift.  Now you may say, and I would almost agree, that bypass surgery and recovery were the life's most precious gift.  Yet, life wasn't enough.  I was existing but not really living.  I wasn't courting Death, but He and I were certainly doing some flirting.  I had come to the place of thinking that if I had another heart attack I'd let go, pass on, die.  I was so very tired of life.

     As gifts go, it was rather innocuous looking.  Just some kind words and a glimpse of something authentic in a world that seemed mostly show.  A man offered me his story story, an amazing tale full of highs and lows, a work still achingly in progress, and I have to say, there's really no gift more precious than someone's story, offered freely, especially to a writer, but not just.  Such a magnificent gift requires a gift in kind, which I gave, freely, without pause.  I was so ready.  And for the first time in years, I felt I was still a work in progress, with blank pages ahead, waiting to be written, my small tale suddenly glorious, maybe even epic.  My Odyssey.

     Those of you reading this blog know what happened next.  You also sense, at least I hope you do, all my blank pages ahead, waiting to be filled.  You know that love came for me out of the blue and that I have a life I may have dreamed of but never thought would ever be mine.  I didn't get what I wanted, but I did let life call some of the shots, and I got what I needed.  May we all of us be wise enough to let go of what we want and open to what we need.

 

Boat In The Sea

     "It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture." Emerson, Nature, 1836

      From the first time I read Emerson, I understood my inherent need to look at the natural world as a metaphor for my inner world.  As without, so within, as within, so without, were my watch-words long before I had heard the name Hermes Trismegistus.  So, for those who know me, it wasn't hard to guess that my journey the last few months - the boat, the islands, the ocean - would find their way into my musings and my understandings of this of my life.  I called this new love an Odyssey from the beginning, paying homage to a book that has influenced me most of my life.  I called it that before I knew that I would be actually sailing the ocean, through islands, trying to make my way to my new home.  


     Boats have been a physical part of my life since I was young.  Even after I found my way to the river town, Sacramento, boats called to me and I felt a continuing hunger to find my way back on them.  Bryan and I reconnected over his purchase and refurbishing of his sailboat, a Kelly-Peterson 44.  Then of course there was the sail from the Virgin Islands to Fort Lauderdale.  Boats apparently had a deeper meaning for me, given the role they were playing in my life.  And so I began to think about boats and they're meaning for me, especially as  was making a sailboat my home.  Jung believed the house a metaphor for the psyche so it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine this boat was a metaphor for Bryan's psyche and mine.


     The Sufi's used the boat in the sea as a metaphor for escaping the mundane atrocities of daily life and floating peacefully on the Sea of Spirit.  Rumi, the Sufi mystic, uses the boat as a metaphor in his poems, but took  further.  In his poetry he often talked about the fact that the sea is not always peaceful, that it is sometimes a Sea of Chaos, and that the boat is a metaphor for our physical and spiritual strength, the integrity of our "boat" telling us much about our own state.  Rumi called every man to learn if his "boat" is seaworthy, if he will sink or sail.  

     Living on a boat, making my life on the sea, I think more and more about the state of my "boat."  It struck me the other day, plugging leaks and sopping water up during a Florida deluge, that holes in the boat are necessary, how else to find your way into the cabin and out, to let air in and out, to help water found the right way in and the right way out?  But there are holes that don't serve,   And in the case of the boat I'm on, undergoing deck refinishing and therefore full of holes, some un-patched necessary holes and some manmade holes awaiting repair, what did that say about me who now calls this boat my home?  What is the integrity of my vessel?  

    I suppose I'm saying that this search for a boat was not just a physical search but a spiritual one too.  And refurbishing it, getting it to suit you, reflects I think, getting your Self in order.  For the Captain of this boat, it all started when he was at the hard, horrible place of getting through each hour, each day.  Then there's the cleaning up, the getting into order. fixing the essentials, hosting the dreams of what you might do until you can determine what you will do.  And there's the sailing, which is what sailboats were born to do, for they are themselves as much as they are reflections of us.   Ships have souls, worked into the very wood and fiberglass of them.  Sail on them, make them yours, and the souls, yours and its, join in an alchemical way, like the divine marriage. 


     The storm passed.  The leaks dried.  I'm still waiting for the decks to be finished and in the meantime, I"m making my life on a 44 sailboat with the man I love.  I think I'm still discovering the ships I'm sailing, both Susurru and the ship of my soul.  I'm still refurbishing and refreshing, determining what repairs are needed, what I need to make my boat seaworthy and what I need to make my ship the ship I want it to be.  I suspect this is what all of us are doing, every day of our lives, making ourselves seaworthy and testing the waters.  The seas are not always smooth, but a good vessel, one with good bones, can navigate even troubled seas and help us find our way home.  May all of us have good ships, worthy vessels.

For Every Bird A Nest -

     When it came to leap, I didn't hesitate.  I left the home that had been mine since 1991 and moved onto a boat, a space already claimed by someone, his home, which I would have to find a way to also make mine.  It wasn't that I didn't love the boat.  I've loved the boat since I first saw pictures of her last fall.  She spoke to me, with her lovely bones and the soul of her, the soul every boat possesses, worked into the wood and fiberglass, whispered through the cut and span of her sail.  Sailing on her from the Caribbean to Fort Lauderdale, I fell even deeper in love with her, if that was possible.  She hungers to sail.  Under loving hands, she flies.  She's strong and sure, bravery, brains and beauty, a triple threat.  Sail on her once, and I guarantee if there is any sea in your blood, you'll fall in love with her too.


     The thing was, is, that she's Bryan's boat.  He found her, saved her.  He poured sweat, blood, and tears into making her seaworthy.  She is filled with his things, except the spaces I have claimed.  He has decided what has gone where.  She's my home too, a home as chosen as the one I lived in all those years, more my home because it's Bryan's home too, but beneath it all is the feeling they're the couple, and I'm the third wheel.


     For me, people are home more than places, and the boat, Susurru, is this wonderful nexus of person and place, why perhaps I feel so comfortable aboard her.   Still, I found it difficult to make my mark on her without Bryan initiating it and weighing in.  And so things have stayed pretty much the same as we've been at the dock.  We've been getting her decks redone, but the inside has stayed as it was when I first moved onboard.  


     When Bryan left for St. Thomas to take the Antillean to Trinidad for hurricane season, I stayed in Fort Lauderdale to look for a job.  That meant Susurru and I were alone together for the first time, for a long time.  It would almost be a month before Bryan returned.  I was going to have to find something to keep myself busy besides sending out resumes and sopping up leaks (long story).  So I began to slowly make my mark on the sailboat I now call home.  Which put me in mind of the Emily Dickinson poem:


For every Bird a Nest—
Wherefore in timid quest
Some little Wren goes seeking round—

Wherefore when boughs are free—
Households in every tree—
Pilgrim be found?

Perhaps a home too high—
Ah Aristocracy!
The little Wren desires—

Perhaps of twig so fine—
Of twine e'en superfine,
Her pride aspires—

The Lark is not ashamed
To build upon the ground
Her modest house—

Yet who of all the throng
Dancing around the sun
Does so rejoice? 


    I may not be the Wren anymore, with her home amid the boughs.  Frankly, I'm not the lark either, given my new watery abode.  Perhaps a gull or a frigate, or maybe the pelicans that frequent the docks, or even the Grackles which showed up in June and have staked their claim, I'm far more likely one of them.  The thing is, now that I'm a creature of the water, a selkie returned to the sea, I need a different nest from the one I had all my years on land.  And I'm building it, bit by bit, the way nests have always been built, depending on instinct, going with my gut, making this place, my place - home.

"Heaven" has different Signs - to me

"Heaven" has different Signs—to me—
Sometimes, I think that Noon
Is but a symbol of the Place—
And when again, at Dawn,

A mighty look runs round the World
And settles in the Hills—
An Awe if it should be like that
Upon the Ignorance steals—

The Orchard, when the Sun is on—
The Triumph of the Birds
When they together Victory make—
Some Carnivals of Clouds—

The Rapture of a finished Day—
Returning to the West—
All these—remind us of the place
That Men call "paradise"—

Itself be fairer—we suppose—
But how Ourself, shall be
Adorned, for a Superior Grace—
Not yet, our eyes can see— 

Emily Dickinson

     Some time in my thirties I was told to start greeting the sun.  I am a child of sunset, born at 5:11 PM, a month past the equinox.  The gloaming is my time; Fall my season.  

     "Why the sunrise," I asked.

     "The sunrise opens the eyes to the world.  Greet the sunrise every morning and you are prepared to see heaven all around."  

     She was right, although it took more than sunrise to bring me to that place.  It took hip surgery and heartache; it took a heart attack and bypass surgery.  I had to come close to death to understand heaven all around us, to see with those kind of eyes.  But even wasn't enough.   It wasn't until I found myself longing for death two years later, that I finally made the leap and changed my life, at last choosing life over death. 

     Now, like Dickinson, I am coming to know the signs of the day.  I am coming to understand what they tell me, the heaven they reveal.  And I come to sunsets differently, as gateways to the rapture, not something to put off, but here every day if we only stop and look.  Every night now, I stop and look.  The ocean gave me that, a month of sunsets so spectacular, so matter of fact, they have woven themselves into my very being.  Love gave me that, days which start in joy and end in it.  There are people who know this instinctively,who see heaven on earth every day and find ways to record it- my friend Kathee and her photographs, my friend Arturo and his paintings, Emily Dickinson and her poetry.  Some of us have to learn it the hard way.  I don't think it matter how we come to have clear eyes, to see the signs of heaven all around, just that we do.  May it always be so. 

I Must Go Down to the Seas Again

... I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.


From Sea Fever by John Masefield


Saturday, Bryan left for St. Thomas to take a boat from there to Trinidad for hurricane season.  In a perfect world, I'd be there with him.  I'd have a job and there'd be weeks before school started, and I could find my way to the water with the man who re-introduced me to my watery nature.  It's crazy, really, given how long I have been landlocked, how strongly the sea calls me, how powerful the draw of ocean is for me.  I find myself throughout the day turned toward the east and the great beyond, filled with a hunger that can only be satisfied one way - sailing far from the sight of land.


This world is lovely, but not perfect.  I'm sitting here in Fort Lauderdale while Bryan is on his way to St. Lucia.  I have sent out 20 plus resumes and have had one interview.  This school district is desperate for Speech Therapists and yet, nothing.  I took a huge leap leaving home, job, who I was and now I think my resolve is being tested.  Do I have the courage to stay the course?  Do I trust that this world wants my happiness as much as I do?    So far, the answer is - sometimes.  


If all goes well, Bryan will be in Trinidad by the 30th of this month, maybe earlier.  Less than two weeks.  The question is what do I do?  I've got a little less than two weeks.  Do I stay here and keep hunting for a job or do I go to Trinidad on the 30th regardless?  The sea calls.  Is it a siren call, or the call of home?  For me, isn't that always the question?  


At last, I know what it feels like to be on the right course.  That's new for me, something I learned on the water.  However, I still don't always know how to silence the voices in my head, all the ones asking me every time we talk if I've gotten a job yet and what am I going to do if I don't find one.  I've always possessed a strong super ego.  I do a fine job of nagging myself toward the expected, the straight and narrow.  What I need is to find onshore, that quiet surety that comes when I'm offshore, far from distractions, just me and the man I love, the wind and the water, a tall ship and a star to steer by.  Will I?  Can I?  Time will tell.  Maybe Masefield knows me better than I know myself.  Maybe 9 to 5 and a steady paycheck and benefits are not for me anymore.  Maybe I was always meant for the vagrant gypsy life.  I certainly have found my laughing fellow-rover.  The only thing I do know, is that Mother Ocean calls me as she calls all her water creatures and I must to the seas again, which perhaps is answer enough.

'Tis Not Too Late To Seek a Newer World

     So what happens after you sail into the sunset?  For a month, more often than not, I sailed into the sunset on a regular basis.  I was the star of my life, not the quirky sidekick.  Every night I slept deeply and well, tired the way full days and real living makes you tired.  I had my Odyssey and I arrived in Fort Lauderdale after a month at sea more truly myself than I have been in years, maybe more than I ever have been.  I understood at the end of that journey, that joy has always been my birthright, though I had forgotten.  I was meant to laugh.  I was meant to be happy.  Who knew I had such reserves of joy in me?

     Of course, the thing about odysseys is that they, by their natures, end.  At least that’s what I always thought.  You come home you’re your adventures, whether they take ten minutes or ten years, and take up daily life again.  Odysseus, the quintessential odyssey-ier did.  That’s what we did too, Bryan and I.  Once in Fort Lauderdale, we began the task of establishing our life together.  There was no more some day and soon.  Some day was here, now, and we were called to live it.

     Everyday life is filled with mundane tasks.  It is by its very nature, both grand and small, extraordinary and ordinary.  Life can hold these kind of polarities with a grace we humans only dream of.  It is grateful as we sometimes neglect to be, joyous as we sometimes forget to be.  Life makes no distinctions between mundane and miraculous.  It celebrates both.  We, or lest I be accused of gross generalizations, me, I tend to focus on the amazing and take the ordinary for granted.  At least that’s how I had spent the last 52 years.

     We did what people do, make eye appointments, order glasses, get a mailbox, a storage unit.  We got our bearings in this new town, found places we liked to eat and places we didn’t.  At the end of the day we sat in the cockpit and watched the sunset, talking, making plans, remembering, dreaming, doing all those simple and wonderful things people do every day.  And one day, I can’t tell you exactly when, I looked up at the sunset unfolding and realized every day, even these ‘mundane,’ dock-bound days, was an adventure, and every sunset, the fairytale sunset the hero and heroine ride into toward their happily ever after. 

     They are a state of mind, odysseys and adventures, as much as they are miles traveled and the unknown encountered.  Sitting in the cockpit of Susurru watching another day end in the glorious show which is the gift of every nightfall, just as the rosy-fingered dawn is the gift given at the start of every day, it struck me, my great ‘a-ha,’ that each of these was just as marvelous and magical as those sunsets and sunrises offshore.  This was the secret I knew once upon a time but had forgotten.  That I wasn’t living every day of my old life, that I death and fallow seemed preferable to life, was my fault as much as anyone else’s.  Life hadn’t betrayed me; I had betrayed life.

     New love reminds me how precious every day is.  It’s love’s particular gift, but his gift too, Bryan’s.  Old love might have done the same, had he and I kept ourselves fresh, remembered with grace and gratitude the blessings of material existence, the sweet and the bitter, the bitter and the sweet.  I see old loves strong still, which gives me hope this can last – this thrill, this thrum, this tingling, stirring of life, of hope, of yes, and yes, and always yes.

     Flying back to Sacramento to see my daughter, I sat next to a woman just on the other edge of 40.  She was returning from two weeks in Europe with her son, coming home to her second family, two boys, seven and nine.  She asked me my story and I told her about my leap, my life on the water, the new love which has brought me back to alive and hope.  “Good for you,” she said.  “Good for you at your age.  Not everyone would be that brave.”  I wasn’t really sure how to reply.  I don’t feel that old and I’m thinking maybe we’re never too old to chose to be vital and alive, to say yes to life, to live, to the next day and the next.  The alternative is fallow, dead, or worse, living death, and despite the current zombie craze, there’s nothing enviable in that state.  No, it’s never too late to seek a newer world.  Every day can be an odyssey and an adventure if we cultivate that particular frame of mind called ‘living.’