I love the rhythms of water, salt water, Atlantic Ocean salt water, Atlantic Ocean salt water that surrounds the island town where I grew up, Newport, Rhode Island. Google Image it. It’s beautiful.
When we were young, my brothers, my mother and I were beach bums. My mother started taking us to Third Beach at Eastertime and every possible day after that at 3:00 p.m. until school was out for the summer. During the summers, we arrived everyday at 7:30 a.m. (a bit later on the weekends) for our daily swimming lessons. We spent the entire day there. Often my father would join us after work for a cook-out or clambake on the beach.
My brothers and I spent every second in the water. Ever swim out to a raft in the middle of an ocean in the reflection of a moonbeam? (so our parents could keep a head count)
Heaven.
I live in California now, but growing up in New England, I learned to resonate with the rhythmical changes the ocean evolves through as it cycles with the seasons.
I’d say that right now my ocean of inner devotion is experiencing what we used to call Indian Summer…that transition time between summer and fall. The water is often the warmest it has been all summer but the tides change drastically. The waves take on a power from further out to sea and that power carries it, like huge castles of sand, sea and foam, to the coast. Those warm and wonderful Indian Summer waves originate from very deep in the ocean. As the individual tidal vibrations rise to the surface, they join and morf into a beautiful never-ending cacophony of pounding surf. For a child who summered at one of the more sheltered beaches, being tossed and thrown about by that force was a fun and exciting wrap-up to the summer.
On those days of high winds and dangerously active waves, my mother packed sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies and drove us not to the beach, but to the cliffs around Ocean Drive. We sat warm, snug and safe in the car, ate our lunch and, from a higher and more expansive view, experienced the awesome power of the surf.
She would remind us that often those waves ushered in something more ominous and dangerous…hurricane season.
Since this black amorphous me has (generously) released itself from the darkness and made my acquaintance, I recognize that its inherent shapelessness is actually fluid and respondent to the vibrations that are deeply active in me just as the ocean swells respond to the tides and currents at the bottom of the sea.
And, I am just now coming to know, the locus of control of the various shapes my amorphous me takes is most often just as difficult to pinpoint as the beginning of a new wave.
I have felt my own internal “hericane” season approaching the last several weeks because of at least two encounters where I had every intention of being vulnerable and transparent but just couldn’t accomplish it. In preparation for these conversations I recognized that fear was moving deep inside me. I ignored it, and my amorphous me stepped in to raise a storm of protection.
It is still active and taking everything I have not to further react, not to go into blame, not to do everything possible to completely annihilate the exposed, coastal homes of those in front of me.
It is a very old feeling to be sure, but one that has not arisen from the depths of my oceanic floor for almost a year. I used to call it “my train.*” Now that I have been told by “my black amorphous entity” that its presence represents a compilation of my deepest darkest fears, I have also recognized that this part of me is a shape shifter with an infinite cacophony of inner swells and waves.
To attempt to find a source for this or any upset is as elusive and impossible as trying to contain one of those wonderful, warm, wild Indian Summer waves in my hands.
In an effort to get a bigger perspective on this storm, I am, for the time being, dropping anchor, leaving my amorphous mate in the boat, making sandwiches, and meeting my mom in the car on the safety of the cliffs.
I hope she remembers to bring the chocolate chip cookies.
* To chronicle my “train” adventures go to www.theyearoftheboy.blogspot.com
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