It has been a few weeks since the last post. I have learned a lot in the last two weeks about myself and this process. As predicted there is a stage in grief that includes a charming dose of anger. I liken it to those ancient sea creatures that lived just over the horizon when the world was flat who would lash out at the unsuspecting sailor and eat them up. Or the sirens luring the Greeks into the islands only to dash their little brains out on the rocks and turn them into pebbles or prisoners . It is terrifying, seductive and righteous.
While most of the people I know live on planet earth, I live on my husband is dead planet and my kids live on I no longer have a dad planet. . On my planet their is an overwhelming desire to run over all those people who are eating french fries, sucking down buckets of coke and smoking cigarettes and along with them it would be swell to knock off all the mean people and probably a few members of the tea party. Not exactly the spiritual path i had planned. How can they all be romping around planet earth when my planet needs so much more energy and compassion and grace than I have.
On my kids planet the over arching question is what the hell do I do now? On their planet Mr. Fix it is gone. There is no one to help with your soul, your taxes, your car engine, your apartment lease, your life choices your anything. The person who was always going to be there just took a powder and they are pissed. Regardless of the layers of civilization, anger is primal and it pops out in the strangest and most fragile times. We all get it .
This week though I have returned to water and to Maine. I began sailing this coast at age 4 and have come here off and on but mostly on my whole life. Water is the constant that eases pain, encourages bravery and can with enough time change the very face of the planet. The sea in Maine is the color of jade and it is equally as cold. The big swells come in from off shore and they roll with a measured relentlessness that is similar to breathing from some distant and mysterious set of lungs. I have sailed every inch of this coast in fog, hurricanes, foul weather and fine - the skipper a huge pain in the ass but no better a sailor ever was. Now I paddle it in a light weight sea kayak which is the only boat I own and can lift. It is black.. hence the name black magic. I have had her out in screaming seas just to see if I can keep upright, thick fog just to practice my navigation . Now i paddle her just to paddle three inches out of the water and in those three inches there is redemption.
It is water that in many ways makes us whole. It is too hard to be angry on the water because you have to be present or you will drown. You can not rail against the injustices of the universe because you are in fact in the universe itself. Water is life .
The light is different here. It floats and refracts off the mica in the rocks, the pines on the shore and the horizon that bends the light off the edge of the world. Perhaps there really are dragons. To be on the water is to be of the water and in that one can find a measure of peace that is not readily available on land. I will savor this small respite from the grief spiders and the anger demons just to spend as much time floating three inches about the surface of the sea as I can breathing at the same rate as the rollers coming in from Spain and in that breathe connect with all that really counts.
The sea is truly magical. The light is like no other except for the high mountains, and even then there are shades that only occur on the ocean. Once you leave land, you leave everything else behind. There's something to the "old man and the sea" notion that drives many of us to return again and again. Wind driven salt is the elixir of choice, and the water itself cleanses and revives the most burdened of us. Renewal and redemption will happen, the kids will be fine, life ultimately will be all good, and spiders don't generally exist on boats.
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