Occasions For Hope

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what          

is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. ~John Buchan

     When I leaped toward this new life, I was so crystal clear that once I made the decision there was no doubt, no hesitation.  I jumped across a continent.  I left everything that was familiar.  I had such faith that I could have love, life, and not lose my child in the process.  

    Once I got here though and got a job, moved from the big picture to the day by day, I will admit I haven't always been so clear.  From time to time I grow afraid.  I have made so many mistakes in my life.  I contained and constrained myself for years to keep myself safe, even if it was more death than life.  

It's hard with the sort openness I have now.  I don't know my edges.  What if I dan't have any edges at all?

     I never realized the extent of the transformation this journey would bring.  I never understood that there was so much farther to go.  I had that life knocked, but this one is up for grabs.  Anything is possible and sometimes, all that possibility, as thrilling as it is, scares the shit out of me.  

     And then there are moments like this - perfect, peaceful, hopeful.  What sometimes seems elusive when I'm thick in the mundane, seems not just attainable, but mine already.  Which of course it always was if I could hold on to what I know and not let fear overwhelm me like it does.  So I gather these moments, sometimes the span of a golden afternoon, sometimes just a moment, a look, a kiss, a touch.  I string them together.  I count them, these occasions of hope, like the rosary they are and I pray to the gods of love and water, hearth and home that I can be brave and choose living over not.   May I remember T. S. Eliot's words, "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go." 

A Scarlet Ibis in a Borrowed Nest

     Florida is a strange place, full of stories.  I know California has its share of stories too, but Florida's stories seem different, dark, lush, slightly fetid, decay and nourishment all mixed together in a kind of primordial ooze from which life emerges, sometimes recognizable life but so often not.  Perhaps that's why every day here starts and ends like an aging beauty, full of stories about her her triumphs and tragedies, all of it a little unreal, sound and fury signifying nothing.

     Florida is a little-bit touched, not quite right in the head.  She doesn't make much sense, at least not in any ordinary way.  You constantly find yourself thinking, "Why that's just crazy," and it is, but it's Florida too.  She's generous that way, pretty much accepting of anything and everything.  If you want to sell swamp land for tract homes, why go ahead.  Florida won't judge you.  She'll support you for 30 years and even when the law lowers the boom, Florida will help you find the wiggle room to get out and sell more.  An exotic, invasive species?  Why Florida really loves you.  Burmese pythons grow so large and are so prevalent here, destroying the native species, they have python round-ups.  Yeah, Florida plays both sides of the fence and you can't really get mad at her for doing it.  It's just how she rolls.

    I've been collecting Florida stories.  I'm making my own worded Cabinet of Curiosities.  She's definitely got her share of marvels and monstrosities.  My most recent discovery fits into the natural history category.  Often on my way to work I have been startled and thrilled by flocks of white and pink Ibis grazing on the neighborhood lawns near my school.  The American White Ibis can be found from the mid-Atlantic through the Gulf Coast.  It's a common sight.  The Pink Ibis though, I was told, is a native to Florida, which is true enough, I suppose.  They're my favorite, the Florida Pink Ibis, the softest pink, sometimes salmon-colored, wandering the green lawns like tiny bits of sunrise fallen to earth.  So imagine my surprise to find out that the Florida Pink Ibis is not a true species.  It's a hybrid, the result of a sixties experiment, you know the kind, senseless, a little crazy, a little cruel.  In this experiment, Scarlet Ibis eggs were placed in the nests of American White Ibis of Hialeah Park to foster.  The goal was to see if they'd be fostered, which they did.  They also mated with their foster families and from this, the Florida Pink Ibis was born.

     It doesn't really change how I feel about the Pink Ibis, that it's nearly as manmade as the infamous plastic pink flamingo.  It does, however, make me ponder a locale where such stories are commonplace, not even the worst of it.  The first story the week when we arrived in Florida was a homeless man eating half the face off another homeless man.  The eater was shot by police, the eat-ee lived, and found himself not off the streets with a new apartment, a job, but with a court-side seat at a Miami Heat play-off game.  Now that's a gloriously horrible Florida story.  The adopted Scarlet Ibis?  Why they're just one more transplant who have made their way to Florida and she does what Florida always does, wraps her arms around them and welcomes them home.

Bridges Enough

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Isaac Newton

     Over the long weekend in January we took a trip to the Keys.  Though my parents had lived in Miami in the mid- to late-seventies, it would be my first visit to this legendary area  of South Florida.  All I knew of it was heavily influenced by pirate lore and Ernest Hemingway, meaning I knew the myth of the place but nothing of what the Keys had become.  

     Bryan had spent some time in the Keys back in the late eighties and had his own understanding of the place -- a little lawless, hard-drinking and hard-living, a little wild.  Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, living his big, boisterous life, wildness seems to be at the core of this man who is now my man.  While my wild ramblings are more of the interior variety, he has lived out loud most of his life.  Sitting dockside, thick in ordinary life as we try to fix the boat for her next big adventure, life is a little too quiet for Bryan.  He hungers for a bit of lawlessness, for live hard, play hard.  He wants some wildness which is lacking here in Fort Lauderdale.  And while we can ponder the role of nostalgia, about what was and is, how we grow older with grace, bowing to limits which we never considered before, this is not that blog.  This blog is about bridges, building them, and rebuilding them, as often as we need to, despite impossible odds or perhaps because of them, because it's about connection and relation and that requires bridges.  The question is, or at least it seems to me these days, is do we have enough of them and can they weather the inevitable storms that will come ashore.

     Connecting South Florida to the Keys seemed an impossible feat back in 1905.  It took a big man, someone like Henry Flagler, the Father of Miami, to tackle it.  With all his resources, it took seven years to get the railroad built that would connect Key West to Miami.  Twice hurricanes destroyed the lines his crews struggled to build, but Flagler was obsessed, driven, and determined to have one thing before he died, to ride the train from Miami to Key West.  He got his wish in January of 1912, and until 1935, this line, dubbed "the Eighth Wonder of the World" remained in service.  When it was partially destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the line was sold to the state of Florida, what would become the Overseas Highway, a hundred and twenty-seven mile stretch of two-lane highway and bridges that becomes US 1 when it hits the mainland in South Florida.  

     Despite it's temperate facade, Florida possesses a dark, untamed heart.  You sense it most at her edges, like the Keys and the Everglades.  She seems hospitable but there are dark forces here that show man again and again, who's boss.  In this way she reminds me a bit of Alaska.  It took hardy people to settle here in the early years.  Swamps, bugs, snakes and gators, lightning, fires, hurricanes - you ignore her sharp teeth at your own peril.  Maybe that's why so many confidence men and shysters took up residence here, became predators in their own right, and prey too.  You see it in the drugs, the sale of Florida Swampland.  Florida doesn't always bring out the best in people.  It may be something about living in a place that seems more dream than reality, like taking up residence in Disneyland, a nice place to visit but a horrible place to live your life.  

     The point is, that given Florida's nature, those bridges were bound to be replaced (you can see the remnants of Flagler's original bridges from the highway, these days acting as walking bridges and state parks).  For a while it was one or the other, a bit here and there.  In the 1980's, the original system was completely rebuilt.  By that point the Keys and the World had decided on connection and there was no question that a way would be found, despite the cost, financial and human, to keep them in relationship.  

     I am a creature of connections, the obvious ones and ones more peculiar.  I take stuff in, let it percolate a bit, and one day, there it is, as if I knew it all the time and just remembered.  Like ourselves, like memories, these connections are both constructed and discovered, chicken and egg.  For most of my life, I kept quiet about my mini-revelations.  It doesn't do to share them indiscriminately.  From time to time I had people in my life with whom I could share myself deeply, but they were few and far between.  At Pacifica Graduate Institute studying counseling I found myself surrounded by people who make connections and during that time and for a long while after, until we drifted too far apart, I felt connected as I rarely had before.  

     There was a lot of hope riding on that trip to the Keys, that we could have our cake and eat it too, make a living, fix the boat, and retain some of the wildness that comes with a life at sea.  That wasn't we found there, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist as much as it means whatever vision we held couldn't be realized by us, there, at this point in our lives anyway.  That wildness, that sense of freedom and charting your own course, that throwing yourself a bit against the elements, well, there's no way to get that, for us at least, sitting on the hook at Marathon.  For us it looked like a watery trailer park, boats packed so tightly together there wasn't an ounce of privacy.  

     We came to our realizations separately, Bryan and I, and in that isolation, I found myself frightened that this might become my life for the next few years, this place that seemed so depressing, the beauty and wildness of the place forced into theme-park like experiences of tiki huts and tiki bars, palm-tree'd trailer parks with their small, contained bits of nature, native and exotic (Florida is a place that graciously welcomes outsiders, lets them take root, and then exposes them to her extremes like a test they must pass, and if they do, then free-reign).  Now my old way of doing things, and what I must admit is still my first instinct, is to go along, to value my significant other's dream more than mine, to do even what I don't want to do, to live where I don't want to live.  I grew up learning a terrible endurance and that is my go to, thinking I can stand anything, ignoring the slow death that comes from stifling yourself and your dreams.  My heart attack showed me that I couldn't keep living this way, but fifty years living one way is a long time and it isn't easy to change yourself and your way of being.  Here I was, back at my go-to, whatever you want we'll do approach to relationship (unasked I might add, my assumption and habit as opposed to reality), and I could feel the weight of it like a physical tightening of my chest.  That old bridge was crumbling but I still used it, as dangerous as it was, as if it was all I had.

     At some point in the afternoon of our first day down there, I built a new bridge.  I looked at Bryan as we were driving and I said, "I don't know about you, but this place depresses the hell out of me.  I don't think I can live here."  He replied, "Thank God, I feel the same."  This new bridge of actually considering my wants and needs as much as my significant other's, of voicing my feelings as mine, without blame, is not just about speaking my peace, but is about learning to dream with another and realizing that some dreams are just that, dreams, never meant to become reality.  They say if you don't go into the dream-state, REM, at night, you'll go crazy and die.  I think that may be metaphorically true as well.  You have to be able to dream on your own and together.  You've got to learn to discern what dreams should be realized and which ones are best left to the imaginary.  You've got to tolerate the disappointment of getting what you think you want, as well as not getting what you think you want.  It's taking me 54 years to learn that I don't always know what is best and to force life into the shape I think it should be keeps me from the beautiful surprises that life can bring if you let it.  So, I'm not just learning to speak my truth with the man I love, using I statements, owning my feelings as my feelings, etc.  I'm learning to dream with another and a variation on the theme of the serenity prayer  (changing the things I can, letting go of the things I can't and having the wisdom to know the difference), in this case, dreaming, realizing what I can, letting go of what won't suit, and being wise enough to discern the difference.  I'm breaking down walls and building bridges, considering impossible feats, like Flagler, and maybe even finding a way to realize them.  May we all build bridges enough to keep ourselves connected.