A Slow Thing Stirs in the Shadow of the Bougainvillea

I love the line above, from a poem, In January, by Lorna Dee Cervantes.  I think it would make a perfect short story title for some sort of weird Florida story, full of magical realism.  For pure strangeness on the Wierd-o-meter, Florida wins hands down.

In the poem, that slow something is the end of a man's life.  Since death is inevitable, there is a certain acceptance of that finality.  That slow something is neither good, nor bad, or perhaps it's both, but it's there nevertheless and inexorable, inescapable.

Of course, it doesn't have to be death in the shadow of the bougainvillea.  It can be love, awareness, joy, sorrow.  It gets to a sense of anticipation, the waiting that sometimes takes over when your life isn't quite what you want and you feel change at your edges but it moves at its own perfect pace, beyond you and your influence.  Which, as I write it, reminds me of another brilliant line, this one from an Auden poem, For What is Easy: "fate is not late."  I found that poem after my heart attack and understood perfectly, in that moment, how all things come at the right time, even if you are sure they haven't, are too full of what ifs and if onlys.

The Face of the Man She Loves

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.  Honore de Balzac

The World As Meditation

J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur — la médiatation — rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour. — Georges Enesco

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

Sea Grapes

Sea Grapes

by Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Those last lines.  They pull me up short today with Mercury retrograde exactly half-way, Saturn turning direct in Scorpio, a Grand Water Trine activated for the next week, emotions spilling everywhere, mine and everyone else's.  How many times have I turned to the Odyssey to soothe me, to help me navigate some rough water?  And always it has consoled, but the rub is, not enough.  In the end, I have to find a way to live with uncertainty, insecurity, and failure.  At least that's the hypothesis of Oliver Burkeman and his recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.  And looking back over the last few years, that's exactly been the lesson for me, at least one of them.  You can't be certain; you can't always work with a net.  And Lord knows, it may not always look like success, although 'failure' may be a much more relative term than we often think it is.  

The classics can console but in the end, it's not enough, they're not enough.  They can provide wise counsel, those classics, but ultimately it's our lives and we are the ones that must do the living - good, bad, indifferent.  

This Place We Call Home

I long, as does every human being, to be at home  

wherever I find myself.  Maya Angelou

Now that I've been in Florida for a year, I'm beginning to think of this as home.  The boating life is, by it's nature, a vagabond life.  That doesn't mean that people don't find the dock and stay there.  In this marina there is a couple that has been here twelve years, the boat never once leaving the dock in all that time.  She's ship shape, built to cross the seas and more than capable of it, and yet, she's landlocked and will be for years more I suspect.  Other boats come and go.  There are a few year-round live-aboards here, but mostly it's boats, here for a while and then gone, which is the nature of boats.  

Susurru is my home now, truly, not just in name as she was in the beginning.  I have even begun calling her that - home.  I talk to her before I go to work and when I come home, when winds and water make her dance or shiver, when she's feeling frisky, or nervous, or sad.  Houses speak in their way, I suppose, but they play it close to the vest.  You don't always know with houses; they can keep secrets.  Boats are more loquacious.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves.  You know what they're feeling.  There's a quote about souls and songs in the wood of boats.  I think that's true of boats like this one, boats who are more handmade.  

The marina is becoming home too, though frankly that has been a harder sell.  Calling Florida home has been an even harder sell.  I'm reluctant to let go of California.  I don't want to get use to this warmth and humidity, this flora and fauna.  And yet, the truth of it is I might be here for a while and I can either stay a stranger or begin to learn about this place, the good and the bad, the beauty and the horror.  And I only know one way to learn a place, to make it home, and that's walking it, learning it step by step, block by block, watching it through the seasons, discovering the plants, which is what I'm doing.  I'm trying to figure out this place I  may call home, someday, maybe.