The Limits of Your Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59

It's hard to believe such a stretch of wildness exists in a place as built-up as South Florida.  Yet there it is, right along the beach, between Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood - John U. Lloyd State Park.  Back in the days of segregation, this was Florida's Negro Beach.  It wasn't the first one.  That was a stretch north of Sunrise called the Galt Ocean Mile.  There the races inhabited the same stretch but never the same place.  Separate but equal was a pretty accurate description.  And then that mile of beach was bought by a developer and another one had to be found.  What is now known as John U. Lloyd was a barrier island.  It could only be reached by dune buggy or boat.  Families in Pompano or Deerfield had to leave early in the morning to get to the beach by noon.  

It's a beautiful beach.  It's the only one around here that still has trees, part of the natural beachscape in Florida, what this land was before development.  But it's a land filled with longings.  A hard beach to get to, separate and unequal, it spurred 'wade-ins' as protests.  Ultimately the beaches in Fort Lauderdale were integrated.  John U. Lloyd, a local attorney and the man for which the beach was named, was instrumental in getting the beach state park status.  It is, perhaps, one of the loveliest and unsullied stretches of beaches in Broward County.  On the afternoon I found my way there, also by boat, to snap this picture, I could feel it, standing there in wind and waves, the longing that lived here still, and not just for a beach you could drive to.  No, it's hungry this stretch, filled the kind of yearning that the horizon brings and a vast expanse of ocean at your feet.  It tugs at you, fills you with a need to just keep going.  There is also a timelessness here too, a reminder amid all the manmade of the land that was here long before we arrived and will be here long after.  It reminded me so much of the Rilke line, "Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness," and his urging to live life fully, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.  This I remembered at last.  This is why I leaped.  We are meant to live.  It's why we were born, why we are here.  We forget that sometimes and it weighs on us, breaks our hearts, urges us to reach and grapple, to deeply engage, to love and lose and love still, regardless.

Perhaps every place can illuminate the limits of our longings, but some places possess a special power, a hunger and timelessness that reminds us why we are here and how fully we must engage.  Every reminder is a good one and every reminder is necessary, not for everyone perhaps, but for those of us called by bad hearts and accidents, by close calls and near misses.  For those that have seen our edges and resided there for a span, there's no losing it, unless at our own peril.  I don't think you get another chance if you've gone to the edge and forget what that taught you.  No, you hold on to the hand and let every feeling come, because none are final, and all we can do is go on.  It's what we're called to do, what life demands.