Love, Fire and the Sea

There are maybe a hundred unfinished pieces hiding behind this one. I sometimes worry that my thoughts scramble before they hit the page. But that's what blogs are for, I think. At least this is what they are for me. A place to download, often quickly, the passing ruminations of a life lived as well as I am able. I am often composing something as I move.

This one is about love, fire and the sea.
I took a long walk down a short beach this morning, past the nudists with their beards and spread-eagles, and through the rotting sea salad that delighted the dog with it's putrid scents. Weaving my way through red alder and big leaf maple branches, slung low over the high tide cobblestones. Patches of sand, and the soft sea air and diffuse sunlight of early October. We are perilously close to the yearly storm cycle, but it's so beautiful today. At the same time it feels to me like the end of an enduring storm season of my own.


I read somewhere recently about a ceremony, a way to cleave away from what haunts you. It sounded good, and maybe everyone needs a little ceremony sometimes. So I took some supplies and kept walking past the populated and narrow band of intertidal zone just as the tide was pushing into its last rising hour. My dog Kimik travelled parrallel to me in the way that he does, sometimes lost in the bushes, only the soft padding of his feet and jingle of his tags as an occasional reminder of his presence. At times I there are glimpses of the white tip of his flag-like tail, and something about that makes me profoundly happy.

It might be worth mentioning that there was a lot of warning about the nudists. Painted on driftwood logs the word "NUDE" is emblazoned across salted wood. Say no more. Beware all ye who enter here.

A thousand years of storm seasons
compressed.

The beginning of my storm season is marked in my accounting of things by the death of my father. That same year there was a series of events, one after another, that seemed to be stacking in layers of loss and magic. In the years after that, although spread a little more generously across time, there was more to come - much of which I was unconsciously engaged in creating, some completely out of my control and all utterly my responsibility to integrate. It has not all been about grief; there have been other things, both miraculous and mundane, like lines of sediment. Gain and wonderment. Pain. A disruption in what I thought was the trajectory and order of my life. A loss of myself, then a re-understanding that is emerging of what I am becoming. A new kind of spaciousness. I have descended, and now I find myself rising back into the light of my own eyes. Emerging slowly at a pace more suited for the shaping of river rock than short-lived humanity, but emerging nonetheless. And I have come to believe that that is ok. It's the best I can do, and perhaps how I am built.

Today on the beach I noticed an internal sense of steadiness, a calm in my bones. I have so often seethed in my impatience with the process. But there has been no rushing it; it has been a complex type of grief, and this period of repair has been long and deep.

Today I am willing to be slow and deliberate. To persist despite a malfunctioning lighter and damp wood. I let the fire burn all the way down, witnessing the pieces of memory, the tokens and words of the past be consumed. Fragments of moments long gone but inexplicably haunting, are reduced to fine white ash and smoke. The fire is ringed with a circle of beach stones. They are disappointment and disillusionment. In the end I take the hot rocks in my hands and toss them away one at a time; they hiss as they made contact with the surface of the ocean.

While I was engaged in this little ceremony, the nudists had arrived. I always find it a bit nerve-wracking to pass by naked people on the beach when I myself am fully clothed. Especially at high tide it's so hard to pass at a distance that feels ok. Even worse because Kimik insisted on getting as close to them as possible, to sniff their dozing faces. But in my becalmed state I had a thought about this discomfort. As I walk by their bare and uniformly tanned asses, I imagine that I myself am returning from my own nudist retreat. For some reason it makes me feel better, even though it isn't true. A subtle yet profound shift in perspective.

I am wandering unguided across this territory of aging. Maybe we all feel that way. Our culture is so steeped in bullshit about age, gender and power.

I have found the cure for heartbreak. This time not in corporeal form, curled up and tangled in a lock of my own hair, even though I have let it grow long again. I found it in the passage of time. In noticing what is close and what is far, and learning to accept that for what it is. In travelling deep into the heart of my own imperfection. In finding all the sharp edges that I still contain. Doing it in my own disorderly and circuitous way.

I am burned down to white ash. And released.