Weathering

     On Tuesday morning the last few feeder bands from Isaac came through Fort Lauderdale.  Rain filled the early morning dark as I prepared for school.  Rain accompanied me to work but stopped somewhere in the faculty parking lot just before school started.  The rest of day was sun and clouds, peace at last after three days of inclement weather.  

     It was my first hurricane.  Early last week they knew it was probably headed this way.  Since we live on a boat, we began the work of getting her ready for the coming storm.  Bryan had been fighting the flu.  I had to go to work.  We did what we could in the afternoons and evenings, and when Saturday came, we spent several hours finishing up and then went to a hotel to hunker down and wait out the storm.  

     That's the thing about weathering.  Shit happens.  You do what you can to get ready.  You understand the limits - the boat's, yours, time, money, skill.  Luck of course, plays its part.  The gods always have their hands in our affairs.  At some point though, there's no more time for preparation.  At some point, the storm hits and all you can do is see just how well you weather it.  

     It struck me sitting in the hotel as waves of wind and rain pummeled Fort Lauderdale, that we all of us find ourselves weathering storms, literally and metaphorically.  And we learn a lot about ourselves about our relationships as we do so.  Oh the risk is high.  We may make it through in one piece but our home can be destroyed, we can be left with nothing.  We can lose people and things that are precious to us.  We can lose our lives.  But we can learn so much, although the lessons may not always be pleasant.

     I learned a lot about the ship I'm calling home during Isaac -- her strengths and the rough, hurt places she needs healed.  I learned about my new relationship -- our strengths and the rough hurt places we need healed.  I realized yet again that the call to know thyself is a life long task.  No matter how enlightened I think I am, how much I've grown, how deeply I've looked into my heart, there's so much more.  A lifetime won't be enough.  And as prepared as I am for whatever storms come my way, and the storms are going to come, at some point I just have to weather them and see how I fare.  I'm alive.  My "house" is still standing, although I'm not sure how sound it is.  Time will tell how I weather this storm, and the next one, and the next.

     Isaac brought to mind a different kind of weathering, the kind that comes with time and elements and wears us away.  This morning, in a startling moment of clarity, this poem by Fleur Adcock came to mind:

Weathering

My face catches the wind
from the snow line
and flushes with a flush
that will never wholly settle.
Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
and only pretty enough to be seen
with a man who wanted to be seen
with a passable woman.
But now that I am in love
with a place that doesn’t care
how I look and if I am happy,
happy is how I look and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake,
my waist thicken, and the years
work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather beaten as well,
it’s little enough lost
for a year among the lakes and vales
where simply to look out my window
at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors
and to what my soul may wear
over its new complexion.

–Fleur Adcock

I'm not sure yet when or whether I'll share what clarity came.  In the meantime, think about how prepared you are for storms, the literal ones and the metaphorical ones.  How will you weather them?  May you be safe and sound and strong.

     

Through Sister Water

"Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure."
-  St. Francis of Assisi

Though I live a block away from the ocean these days, I find I miss deep water.  It's not enough to look at the ocean, to wet my feet in it.  Even a swim doesn't soothe me like it used to.  There was a time that the sound of the waves in my ear was enough to give me perspective.  Since my time offshore, though it's comforting, the ocean, but not enough to center me anymore.  

I understood the world offshore.  It was full of strange beauties as well as potential dangers, but it was simple.  There was just Bryan and I, the boat and the ocean, the course we charted.  The complexities of life, the should I or shouldn't I, slipped away.  My world narrowed to 44 feet of fiberglass, teak and canvas, and one man.  And I knew a peace and happiness I had never known before, my mind a far-reaching, ever-spinning spider of a construct, weaving endless pasts and futures, forgetting as I had done for years, the precious, fragile beauty of the present.

I've been back in the world now for a few months now.  I'm caught up in all the daily complexities of life.  I'm walking the beach, swimming, but I need deep water and wonder how, on the dock, going to work, making a living and life, how I'm going to find the peace and surety offshore brought me.  I think this is my challenge.  I've learned to be brave, to leap.  I've learned to dream and reach for those dreams.  I've learned what it feels like when I'm on course, aimed toward my true north.  Now it's time to find that peaceful place beyond the noise of everyday life, to the essentials, my essentials, that narrow world of me and Bryan, of boat and and ocean, and the course we have charted, our course.  May I find my way with grace, sooner as opposed to later.

They Came From Sand, They Go Back To Gravel

… The ocean,

cumbered by no business more urgent

than keeping open old accounts

that never balanced,

goes on shuffling its millenniums

of quartz, granite, and basalt.

It behaves

toward the permutations of novelty—

driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s

beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up

residue of plastic—with random

impartiality, playing catch or tag

or touch-last like a terrier,

turning the same thing over and over,

over and over. For the ocean, nothing

is beneath consideration.

From Beach Glass by Amy Clampitt

All That Is Not Gold

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it

all that is not gold.

 --Leo Tolstoy

We make major leaps.  We transform our lives.  We feel, perhaps for the first time, centered and peaceful, right and true, completely ourselves, happy.  Maybe it's hubris, but I think it's more finding yourself on your path, where you should be, and you slip, at least I did, into thinking all of this is a destination, a point to achieve, an equation that leads to happy, something that can be known, repeated, proved they way they made us prove things in math all those years ago.  You open your mouth, expecting diamonds, and you get toads.  

Now you're smart.  You close your mouth, take a breath, center, fill yourself with peace and love.  You open your mouth, sure something perhaps not marvelous but at least enlightened will come forth.  And there they are, more toads and nasties.  I can remember in therapy asking my therapist if I had to deal with my father issues.  "Not until you're ready," she said with her sweet, motherly smile.  And then my dad died and I was thick in my father issues.  Apparently there's no hiding from the work of ourselves.

So here I am in Florida.  I've found my way back to water; I've found my way back to love.  I've learned to leap, to risk, to collaborate with life and live as opposed to letting life live me.  I'm beginning to understand my worth, not in pride, but just realize the gifts I bring and in the job area, how I have a right to have that honored and to be renumerated commensurate with that experience.  I'm understanding the difference between standing firm in my truth and fighting.  But I still can't talk to my mother and she still can't talk to me.  So much growth, but not here.  Here I am still a child, looking for the "good" mother instead of the "good enough"mother I have.  I keep looking for the big hug, for the comfort and consolation, for the unconditional love.  At some point, don't I have to let go, stopping looking for isn't, and come to peace with what is?  

We manage to get through the call, to end on a relatively happy note, but memory of the conversation tastes rusty in my mouth.  Is it time to deal with my mother issues?  That is the question.  And for the first time I'm not sure of anything, which perhaps is just where I need to be, at the wisdom place of Socrates, knowing that I know nothing.  

For many years I believed in the Platonic ideal, in The Truth.  Now, I think, I may be finally willing to let go and let life wash away everything, and leave the gold.  May it be so.

With Eyes Open

"The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."  Henry Miller

I could tell you that I always paid close attention to the natural world.  My first memory is of the full moon streaming through the high window of my bedroom, a converted walk in closet, back in Milwaukee.  My second memory, was standing on a screened back porch, watching dust motes dance in sunlight, riveted by the magic of that slow, glittering dance.  But attention is a funny thing.  First regard, or second, or third, or tenth or a hundredth might reveal some truth, surprising or not, but not the only truth.  To know this is begin to understand the wondrous mystery of this material existence.  

It wasn't until my heart attack though, that I began to take a more particular notice. Sometimes I used my camera to capture the individual perfection of a rose, the same bush captured day after day, each rose its perfection, ear similar but none ever exactly the same.  Sometimes I just used my eyes.  Sometimes I passed by a tree and let my hands explore the marvel of trunk, discovering its valleys and hills, the rough and smooth as personal as a fingerprint.  Sometimes, I knelt and observed a bug make its way across the concrete, clamber up a branch, hover and settle.  There were times I leaned in, head cocked to one side, given lichen my most intense scrutiny.  This was how I pieced my world back together after it was ripped apart, brick by brick, flower by flower, day by day, month by month, season by season.  

I'm not sure that I was expecting answers or truths, although I will tell you I got some.  Mostly, I think, I needed to rediscover the mysterious, the wonderful in a world that seemed neither.  I wasn't dead from my heart attack, but I wasn't alive either.  I suppose if I wanted to label what I was, I'd call myself Undead, not vampire but zombie, going through the motions of living, nearly alive, but not quite.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't clamoring for brains, but there was something automatic in much of what I did, it was the semblance of life but not the actuality of it.

And still I walked, observed, took pictures, scrutinized.  I regarded the turn of the day, the passage months, the seasons coming and going, one year chasing the other.  I paid close attention to blades of grass, the petals of roses, the clouds, reflections in puddles, trees, leaves attached and fallen.  I listened to the wind through bare branches and newly leaved ones, through full green glory of summer and brittle rustle of autumn.  And somewhere, in the midst of all this, I understood where I was, what I was, and I prayed, the only way I ever prayed, with the fierce yearning of my heart, now new, for a real life and all that entailed, both the joy and the sorrow, the wondrous and the mundane.

I got the real life I prayed for.  In the last few months I lived more than I have in years, and I've felt alive, a zombie no more.  I have marveled at the world around me, at the places I've been, at the people I've met.  I haven't made the detailed observations I did.  The world is mysterious and marvelous, but I have come to a place where I'm ready to take a breath and go deeper, to see what more is waiting to be revealed.  I've started walking the beach of the place I now call home.  I'm beginning to pay close attention to the water, the sand, the wind, the sun, the clouds, the sounds and smells.  I don't know what I'll learn or when it will come, the revelations that arrive when we spend time contemplating the mysteries.  I can't wait though, to find out.  

Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Those to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; their eyes are closed." May all of us experience the mystery in a blade of grass, in a grain of sand, in a wave, in anything and everything.

Arriving Where I Started ....

...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.  T.S. Eliot,
Little Gidding, Four Quartets

I love T. S. Eliot.  I've been reading his Four Quartets since Sophomore year in college, each time his words ringing me like a gong.  They're magical those words, the way good poetry is, reverberating with the kind of truth you feel in your belly and blood and bones.  I've read the stanza from Little Gidding before, loved it, shared it.  Other sections from the Quartet have struck through out my life, but his seems to be the refrain of whatever song or poem is mine, the words I recite over and over, the words that ring me like a bell, bring forth a clarion call.

Today, with back to school fast approaching and Bryan far away in Trinidad, I found myself walking the beach near where we're docked in Fort Lauderdale.  We've been here since June 9th, but we haven't really been here.  There was a trip to Dallas to meet Bryan's family and for him to work.  Then here was the return to Florida with his car.  After that, there was a few day span and then I went to Sacramento for a week.  I was back for a few days and then Bryan left to take a boat from St. Thomas to Trinidad.  You see what I mean?  We've been here but not long enough to find our rhythms, to learn the place, to see how we are here together.  So I decided it was time to learn how I was here, in this place I am now calling home.  And since the sea calls me on the West Coast, offering up wisdom, peace, and courage, I wondered how the Atlantic would treat me.

I will tell you, when the ocean is in your blood, the water works its magic wherever you are, beach or far from shore.  When you're a water maiden, whether mermaid or selkie or ondine, the ocean talks and her words fill your ears with a shush and a roar and your heart beats to the rhythm of waves on shore, or swells against hull.  You can be on land, but your soul is underway, and the places you go ....   All the important things I have learned about life, about myself, about the heart and soul of me, I have learned in the company of Mother Ocean.

So I walked the Fort Lauderdale beach.  I let the waves sweep over my feet, that warm, clear water of the Atlantic.  I let the ocean fill my ears, the waves dictate the beat of my heart.  I let thoughts come and words find form.  A year ago, at the start of another school year, I had no idea where I would find myself at the start of the next.  Oh I thought I knew.  I saw my life stretch before me, year after year, a terrible sameness.  And yet, here I was, in the span of 12 months, on the other side of the continent, my feet wet with the water of an unfamiliar ocean, my life not at all the same, the surety that I would never have love again replaced with the surety that love is everywhere, well within my grasp if I just opened my eyes and my heart.  It was hard and yet it really wasn't, this change of life, and it was much more wonderful than anything I had conceived of, could have conceived, so trapped I was by what I thought was possible.

On I walked in the gentle surf that marks the Atlantic in South Florida.  I stopped, looked out toward the horizon, remembering the time two months before I sat at sunrise just at that spot waiting in that vast ocean to come into the marina of the city I would now call home.  I felt so much like I had as a kid walking along Sunset Beach, my feet splashing in the Pacific.  And it struck me that I was back where I started, back by the water I hungered for.  Not the Pacific, but the ocean is the ocean.  Pacific or Atlantic, it didn't matter.  It just mattered that this water maiden had found her way back a watery life.  I was the same, but I wasn't.  That adolescent beach girl was yearning, hungry, waiting for life to find her and take hold.  This water woman is centered, happy with where she is, co-creating with life and living it as opposed to it living her.  Back where I started, but with new eyes, seeing it all just as it was, me as I am, for the first time.  Hard, but not really, to come to this place.  Yes it took time, but it needed to, nothing wasted, everything perfect, everything in preparation.  In the end it doesn't matter how long a took, only that I have returned to the sea, and this place, to me, truly, for the first time.