How do we balance sun and shadow, individual growth and community responsibility, sustainable safe relationships with exploration and adventure? How can I be a poet in every day life, fall in love with sunrises and seagulls and bars of soap like Billy Collins in his gorgeous poem Aimless Love that I first heard in a small seaside Unitarian Universalist church when I was looking to find acceptance and welcoming for my ragged pagan soul inside white clapboard walls.
How do we quiet the wild longings of the heart? Can a sea priestess don the mantle of a bride? For me I found my serenity at the edge of the sea, in the middle of a busy intersection. At 3 am the trucks are silent and I can hear the constant breath of the ocean lulling me, like the heartbeat of a mother or a lover or a living wide presence. I can watch from my window the dog-walkers and the seagulls and the pigeons. From this 2nd-floor vantage on the world, I am in that perfect balance between connectedness and remoteness.
Like Spalding Gray, in "Swimming to Cambodia," I am learning to know the sea.
The sea is a lovely lady when you play in Her,
but if you play With her, she's a bitch"
The bitch claimed his life, in the form of a river. Yet I still choose to walk in the footsteps of the artists, the writers, those who claim the edges of the world.
My ideal is the snowy egret who visits these waters, a unicorn bird whiter than it has any right to be against the brown mud of the waters of the Cut bridge, now only a few hundred feet from me. Watching the egrets, breathless as if visited by angels or aliens I saw the truth of grace in transition-- they do not land on water or land clumsy and heavy like a duck-- they simply flow from water to air, wings open, necks fluid, legs lifting effortless in slow motion.. there is no jarring moment of impact, as if they are held up by something more rarefied than gravity, they trust their bodies to the air, the water and the muddy embankment alike. I want to rise so gracefully between states, but it is that very longing that lifts me and keeps me hummingbird-frenzied wanting HERE to be THERE, THEN to be now.... The egrets, Buddha hunters who stand motionless waiting for prey even in the midst of storms that end weddings and send baseball players scurrying for cover... they have taught me what I need to know to dare to test my own edges.
That is why the ocean now is my dearest most constant companion. Perhaps I am a cat-- who falls in love with places and is indifferent to faces. Yet it is not because of lack of love it is that with love and a warm bed can come limitation of freedom, a loss of hunger and vitality.
Some of us need that to thrive, to live, to really see and hear the ocean and feel the sunshine that falls from heaven every day.
So I am here now, testing the waters, gathering sea-glass in storms. I am here serene and contained in the center of the maelstrom. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
More Later
Blessed Be
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Aimless_Love.html
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