It is strange how much I wrote in 2020 that I do not even remember. It was not an easy year - a year I almost wore away. Standing here in 2022, I don't know what lesson to take (if any needs to be taken) - that what one may choose to share with the world is a limited view of how one is... How desperately I might have written these words as a way to try and believe them into being. If I did feel a sense of hope that day - that both things, immense challenge and a longing for rest and the blessing of life, can exist simultaneously.
Perhaps I took what I needed from that day and while the meaning in the moment may be gone, it is not lost... Only shifting over time, as often as I come back to this passage to meet it again, with all of the changes that life brings.
The way you feel the tide gently pull at your balance, whisking away the soft sand you bury your toes in. The very ground you stand upon disappearing from beneath you, pulled out to sea, called there as you feel your heart is in this moment. You hear the wind across the waves, it pulls at your clothes, tangles your hair - a buffeting hand that pushes you forward, further into the salt, then just as suddenly shoves you back, as if teasing. Its playfulness fills you with nervous energy. You laugh with giddiness, catching yourself suddenly when you stumble in the wake of its unpredictable gusts, when it turns sharply from playfulness to a more dangerous tone. It tears at the waves until white specks of froth fly, shattered glass catching the light in a million fragmented pieces as you gaze across the endless hues of blue/green.
Your eyes pulled to the horizon, where blue meets blue and blends together into one... Promising something... Possibility? An endless desert of blue expanse? A shoreline barely discernible in the fog? The edge of the world pouring into abyss?
But you are here on the shore. Grounded in this moment.
Your thoughts are slipping and tumbling as fast as the waves rolling onto the shore, breaching their relief onto the rocks, heaving forth heaps of tangled green. Shattered shells, wearied driftwood, fragments of coloured glass glittering like gem stones frosted with wear and time, there is history layered in these shores. Stories washed up as debris. The cry of seagulls overhead is echoed in your own lungs.
You stand in a moment of majesty, a grain of sand, pushed and pulled and tumbled, worn from time and erosion. Taken from the land and brought back, built up, borne again into new shore on which the waves will someday break. Maybe one day in a million years, when the sea has moved on and you rise to be the dunes of a desert, and you reach up with the tips of your fingers, shaped by the wind into golden waves. Your crest will break. Your edges caught in the wind and the dust of you will be carried across a vast expanse of blue to nourish faraway lands.
In falling rain and dense jungle, where rivers as wide as oceans flow through the impenetrable green, someone looks up to the sky and feels they are standing in a moment of majesty.
- S.
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