The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its nets of wonder forever.
Jacques Cousteau
Between Sea and Shore
(I know I've posted this image before but it fits the post best!)
Some days, my longing for the sea is palpable. Today is one of them...a gray, rainy day, the first of several this week...and I can think of nothing I'd rather be doing than walking along the beach at Cape Cod or Cape May, or Rehobeth, La Jolla, even Galveston before the summer crowds descend. The ocean in all its many moods and guises has always been a metaphor for my life's journey and there are times only those hours alone on a quiet beach can help me to decipher the lessons along the way. Some years ago I picked up a stone on the shore at Race Point, one of those diamond days - so perfect you could never forget it, shared as it was with my dearest friend. I've kept the stone for all these years and carry it with me to remind me of all the sea has to tell me.
THE WORRY STONE
I carry it in my pocket,
roll it around there letting
it shift from palm to fingers,
trace its contours with my
thumb
and remember the day I
picked it up at the beach,
that brilliantly sunny
afternoon at Race Point…
how it caught my eye
amidst all the other pebbles
because it was not yet
perfectly smooth, though
quite well-polished, different
in hue and composition
from an ordinary stone,
a worn conglomerate
of sparkling quartz and
dull gray limestone,
one black clast of obsidian
distorting the smoothness.
My thumb catches the fragment,
worries it, like one worries
a broken tooth with the tongue,
feeling the irregularity there,
probing it with questions -
what long journey has this
stone
made to find itself on this
shore?
How was it shaped by that
voyage,
battered, abraded and pounded,
its rough edges worn down,
by long ages of pressure,
the travel across distant seas
cementing together all
the disparate metals and
minerals,
compressed now into one
remarkable and unique stone.
I carry it with me in my pocket
and worry it with my thumb
to remind me of my own
uniqueness, melded from all
the separate pieces of self,
light and dark, rough edges
scoured by the unrelenting
rhythm
of life’s ocean into a new
whole
that is finally becoming me.
Perhaps I'll get back to the sea this summer - but even if I don't, it's always in my heart, always reminding me that some things are eternal, that there is an ebb and flow to life that one must learn to accept. But like the tide...what seems gone will return...and find me waiting.
