Friday, November 1, 2013

I need to tell you about the ocean.

Hi there.
I don't want to waste time on how I haven't come here that often.
I love my life, my Vienna, my Jared, my business, our little duplex in our charming neighborhood full of boutique stores and lantern lights on big porches.
I'm still hungry, though.
Hungry to know the future, to remember people of the past better. It's easy to let the days and nights slide by in work and Vienna, baby and photography, it's all the same but still really really good. But I want to reach out more, think more, write more. So I took this afternoon off because I can. I've been filling up on floral arranging 101, how to decorate your house eclectically. The blazing afternoon sun is fall through my blinds at 5:01 on November the first, and it's so delicious I turned on the air conditioning through our errands today.

Yesterday was Halloween and I stayed home to pass out candy to kids for the first time in my life. And we didn't have one single trickortreater. It feels so wrong to be old enough to stay home and pass out candy. That's going to be somebody's job for every Halloween from here on out, I guess, unless we keep living in our charming old little duplex where people don't see the second door on the porch.

Bon Iver speaks to me, loud. Any mood he comes along. Any day any feeling. I close my eyes and go to deep lake with clear blue water, summertime, rope swings, cabins and docks and towel dried hair. I go and stay there for the whole of summer, crying with delight as the water takes me under its wing.

That reminds me--I gotta tell you about the ocean in October in California. It is the best place, and when you're in you can see for miles around and up and down nothing but blue, blue, sun blue! I jumped with the waves and let out a squealy scream every time it would suck me in only to push me back up. Something about the water energizes me, tickles the cells in my bones and lights me up. Sand in my toes and foaming bathing it all away. I caressed the mossy rocks with my fingertips and the mussels called back, telling how long they'd been there. So many stories in those rocks, kept fresh by the constant crashing waves.

The water was only cold at first but it was just me and the other crazy kids out there, neck deep and screeching in delight with every wave. I have to shake that crazy kid awake else she gets lost running errands, getting gas and ignoring boring mail.

I expected to still feel the tide in me lying in bed, but I didn't. It left, I guess, with those fleeting ins and outs. The ocean makes me feel alive like nothing else.
Til you venture out on the rocks further than you dare, and you feel like the Little Mermaid, til you kiss the salty waves with your pulsing lips, til you know in your sand-covered toes that this is the biggest and best thing on God's green earth--you can't understand how it still somehow, wonderfully, keeps you alone. One with all the things you ever wanted absorbed into you.

Then maybe a dolphin rears its head, maybe a cluster of birds flies over you, and you get swallowed in the wholeness and fullness of the ocean, peaceful and exhilarating all in one bite.

I pushed the seaweed out of my way, floated and flew farther and I could still touch. More seaweed. I got eye level with the waves and welcomed them--how could I ever be scared? My whole life is in front of me in those waves, killing people every year but giving life to zillions of gorgeously useful creatures and thousands of other things we know nothing about, so I won't feel knotted and worried when the ocean is here, the world is here, and I believe in adventure always. Bon voyage.