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.
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