Even as a child, there always seemed to be some disconnect between “me” and the world around me. It was more than a sense of shyness, or not fitting in, or being different. It was more like a hyper awareness, or extreme self-consciousness—as if I stood outside myself, watching myself as I moved through the world and interacted with others. Other people seemed to live in the moment, embedded in experience. I always felt somewhat removed, disconnected, as if I floated above experience and not in it.

I don’t know now if this was a continuous feeling, or something that I felt so deeply and strangely at different times growing up that I identified with the feeling—of not being quite grounded in “reality,” the reality that others seemed to experience and take for granted.

I wrote about the experience in a short story called “Fine and Shimmering” which referred to the tenuous thread that tied Sheri (the main character) to the real and kept her grounded.

It was curious, this sense of separation she felt whenever she tried to blend in with a crowd, of always rising to the surface, alien and exposed, the way oil will when mixed with water. All her life Sheri had struggled with this lack of gravity and the need to be grounded in something more substantial than herself. Even in high school simple things eluded her, set her apart. How to walk, how to talk, how to laugh out loud.

Later she describes it this way:

[S]he felt unusually light-headed, as if she and her body, always out of sync, had reached some new height of disjunction. Once when Sheri had read a book on astral-projection she was startled to learn of that shimmering silver cord that supposedly tied the astral body to the solid one. What startled her was the awful realization that all her life she had been attached to reality by a similar, tenuous thread, let out so far that she seemed to float above experience, never in it. She had always to be so careful, to move so still, so as not to break that fine thread.

Like Sheri, I felt I was in the world but not of it, tied to it but floating above it. Like watching a film where I was a character in the story, so there was always two of us, the watcher (distant and removed—the “real” me) and the watched, the character I was playing as events unfolded (the actor, the role-player, the “pretend” me).

This could have evolved from being a quiet child who was a keen observer of life. As an observer, you are always once removed from the things observed. There is always a distance between you and those you are watching, or the events as they are unfolding. This experience is disconcerting, to say the least. It‘s like trying to carry on a phone conversation while hearing the echo of your own voice. Like living in an echo chamber. Or feedback loop.

I could never figure out if this was a characteristic peculiar to me, or if others felt the same way. Do we all live in this echo chamber, this constant feedback loop? Or only me and a few other odd ducks? I still don’t know. Either way, it was experienced as something undesirable, something that set me a part, and created a distance between me and the “immediate,” “the real,” an “authentic” self.

Looking back, in some ways, it’s not surprising I felt this way, disconnected from the world– it’s a wonder we all do not. After all, we come into this world understanding that our time here is brief and tentative—any moment we can be torn from it through a fatal accident or tragedy or disease or violent event. And even if we have the good fortune to live a very long time, when the end comes, we realize what a brief moment in time it actually was.

We also come to see that this “I” we identify with is constantly changing. We are not the same “I” as an infant as we are as a teen or a parent or an elder. And any manner of things can change us or warp us or shape us along the way. Our identity is tentative and temporary at best.

And where is this “I” located? In our personal history? The labels that identify us? The many hats and roles we play in life? Does it reside in our heads? Our hearts? Our bodies? Does this “I” stop where our skin ends? Or does it move within and without us, like our breath? Does what I see, hear, feel, become part of me in the act of holding them in my thoughts, becoming part of my mind, my brain, my experience, my memory? Do observer and observed become one? Two parts of one indivisible experience?

Is it a wonder I felt lightly tethered to the “real,” to this human experience where “I” am constantly changing and impossible to pin down or separate into a distinct entity?

Sheri experienced this “unbearable lightness of being” as something oppressive that she rebels against. In the end though she learns all that’s needed to be free is to let go:

To take that fine and shimmering thread between sharp teeth and snip it clean through. To drift aimlessly, like the merest wisp of cloud, a lingering trace of dawn, upon an otherwise immaculate sky. Awaiting that final dispersal, into the blue.

Sheri experienced “letting go” as drifting off into an unencumbered void.  Mine was quite different.

When I finally learned to “let go” it was truly liberating. It was letting go of a sense of “twoness” and embracing “not-two.”

When that wall of “otherness” disappeared, I felt deeply connected to this ephemeral world. I felt a lightness of being that is “unbearable” only in the sense of being too sweet, too rich, too beautiful “to bear.” And so I didn’t try to hold onto it. I just let it wash though me.

I’ll write more about this in another post.

In the meantime, if you’d like to hear more about Sheri’s story “Fine and Shimmering,” you can read it here: Fine and Shimmering 0513 pdf

So I was pleased when my short story “When Things Go Missing” was published in the newest issue of Unchartered Frontier, an online literary journal. The story is actually an excerpt from a novel that I’m writing. Here’s the synopsis.

One day Fran heads toward the grocery store and keeps on going till she reaches the tip of South America. Meanwhile she leaves behind an empty hole in the lives of her family, an insecure daughter trying to cope with the rigors of graduate school and lackluster love life, a son strung out on heroin, filled with self-pity and rage, and a husband who plots her course across the continent with push pins on a map as he pays her credit card bills. How they cope with her mysterious disappearance and the cryptic phone messages and photographs she sends them, as well as rediscover each other and forge new relationships in her absence, creates the heart of this novel.

The Prodigal Son by Rodin

The novel is written from the perspectives of three main characters, the daughter Kay, the son Cal, and the husband. The short story is Cal’s first chapter (adapted to stand-alone). His story is particularly difficult to write (and perhaps read) because many readers will not find him sympathetic at the beginning. For others who have experience with addiction, ADHD, or love-hate parental relationships, his story may be painful and heartbreaking, and might hit a little too close to home.

But for those who love a good “prodigal son” story, or like rooting for the underdog–cheering for Rocky Balboa when he ran up those stairs, or rooting for Bradley Cooper’s character in the recent film Silver Linings Playbook–I’m hoping they will cut Cal a bit of slack.

A lot of things are missing or perceived missing in Cal’s life, as the title “When Things Go Missing” indicates. It’s interesting how so much of who we are is shaped by the things missing or absent in our lives–as much as, or more so perhaps, than what’s actually there. The whole premise of the novel is how the mother’s absence shapes the lives of those left behind, as well as how they come to “re-see” her in light of her absence.

From the film Silver Linings Playbook

But it’s also about how we struggle to make sense of our lives, struggle to piece things together when so much seems missing.  Especially since how often these puzzles are pieced together from scraps of memories, misperceptions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, misinformation, as well as our own prejudices and preferences, which often blind us to what actually is. Those missing pieces come to shape how we see each other as much as what’s actually there. In some ways, none of us are really what we are perceived to be by others. We are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories.

The miracle, perhaps, is how we connect at all. How despite all that would seem to conspire to keep us apart, we come together nonetheless.

If this sort of thing interests you, you can read “When Things Go Missing” online in Chartered Frontier. You can also download the journal for free in a number of forms.

Here’s the opening of the story to get you started:

Cal stands on the front stoop of his parent’s home with a cold breeze swirling around him, liking the damp chill seeping into his skin, goosing it up. The sun is almost gone, a faint, dull glow smeared along the horizon. Dusk settles like ashes over the neighborhood rooftops. He watches his sister backing her Volvo down the driveway, heading off to Northridge or Norwalk or wherever the hell she’s living these days. She’d come home looking for a little comfort since mom had gone missing. Fat chance of that. But he’s sorry now that she’s gone, sorry he hadn’t at least said he loved her, or asked her for a loan, and missing her even before she disappears around the corner. He takes a long last drag on his cigarette, squeezes the tip, and drops what’s left into his shirt pocket to save for later.

It feels weird walking into his parents’ house without knocking, even though he’d grown up here, been living here since his last stint in county jail, and off and on over the past ten years. He’s acutely conscious that this is not his home and never really had been, not even when he was a kid. He sucks on the fact like a sore tooth, teasing it, testing it with his tongue. It’s like he’d been born homeless. Like from the day he was born they were all just waiting for him to move out again. The thought fills him with a strange sense of satisfaction: Cal didn’t need a home. Didn’t need anything, anyone. Ever.

I hope a few of you will take the time to read this and let me know what you think. It would mean a lot.

Related articles

• Curl up with a good (short) read during Short Story Month! (iupress.typepad.com)
• The Future of Short Fiction is Looking Good: Pixel Hall Press Announces PHP Shorts & Invites Queries from Short Story Authors (prweb.com)
• May Is Short Story Month! (recordedbooksblog.com)

The truth is, we were just what we needed at the time. This dark, moody often angry young man who could also be so sweet and loving fulfilled a romantic yearning in me to sooth the savaged soul—Beauty and the Beast, after all, had always been my favorite fairy tale. And he was sorely needing the sweetness and innocence he saw in me, after the things he had witnessed in war. We fit together perfectly in each other’s arms. We still do.

But now I no longer believe in soul mates. I discovered that all the things I was attracted to in him, that seemed to be missing pieces of me, were really undeveloped parts of myself, and a sense of “completion” could not come from outside me but from within. Once I realized that and began to discover that I too was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident and capable, I no longer yearned for a soul mate. I could stand upright and free even while fully committed to our marriage. We did not need each other, but we chose to be together. We were committed to creating a life that we both could love and enjoy together.

I had always loved what Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet had written about marriage, and came to see the wisdom of his words:

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I also came to realize what Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From The Sea” wrote:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

And finally, I whole-hearted embraced what Madeleine L’Engle in The Irrational Season” wrote:

“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take . . . . If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is par t of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”

My husband and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary last week. Here’s what I’ve learned about lasting love: That marriage is a journey, not a destination, and the way will be hard, and filled with obstacles and challenges and heartache. That real love is not “true love.” It’s not a given. It doesn’t come ready-made. You have to fight for it, you have to work for it, you have to shake it out from time to time, and mend it and keep adding stitch after stitch, row after row, if you want to make it big enough and strong enough to last a lifetime.

Our marriage quilt is a tattered thing, but beautiful in its homeliness, in the places where its obvious rips and tears have been mended over and over again, the places where it’s grown thin and threadbare and had to be reinforced, as well as the places where it’s warm and soft and scented with memories that bring deep pleasure.

Loveliest of all are the stitches we are still sowing day by day, moment by moment, hand in hand, together.

I will end this series of posts on love and marriage with the last love poem I wrote my husband, a few years after our marriage had almost ended.

It is a simple, playful poem, meant to please a man who is not a lover of poetry, but loves the woman who writes it.

To Dale, On Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary

Sometimes you ask me if I really love you,
Like the answers hid behind a lock and key
You are my love and all the world must know it
For it’s scattered ‘cross the land and half the sea.
There are winds and waves much sweetened by our pleasure,
Rocks and sand well smoothed by hips and thighs,
Grass that grows much greener from our nearness,
And trees that rustle still with sated sighs.
If you climb a certain stream that flows near Big Sur
You’ll find a rock well made for lying on,
It knew our love before it was made sacred
And longs to feel our lover’s urge again.
While high along the rugged spine of Baja,
Where boney cliffs fall far to find the sea,
We saw the world stripped bare of all but beauty
And we alone like Adam and his Eve.
The moon once tipped the hills beyond Coyote
And laced Conception Bay with fluorescent light,
We swam out naked through those silken waters
Where you would me round your hips and held me tight.
And cupped within the palm of Virgin Gorda
Lies an island and a secret, sandy cove,
Where we waded from the sea like mating mermen
And stretched upon the sand to prove our love.
The wind once made an early morning visit
As we rolled upon a hook in Carib Bight,
While sweeping down the hatch it caught us naked
And added its cool breath to our delight.
Now wind and sea and rock and tree can tell you
The answer that you say you do not know,
You are my love and all the world’s a witness
For its sung wherever winds and waves do blow.

NOTE:  This ends a series of posts that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are the first four posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. 

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

I had already asked my husband for a separation, suggesting he move out. He only laughed and said he wasn’t going anywhere. I knew I would have to be the one to go and began planning my escape. Soon, I thought, terrified by what he might do if he knew I was already seeing someone.

Then he found out. When he confronted me, I told him the truth, that I had fallen in love with someone else. I was astounded by his response. It was so unlike anything I had imagined. He said he did not blame me. He had always known that I was “too good” for him, and if this man was better, he’d step out of the way.

But after confronting the man too, after meeting and talking with him, he said the man wasn’t good enough.  He was the better man, and he wanted me to give him another chance. He was sure he could make me fall in love with him again. And while I knew that was impossible, I felt I had no other choice but to let him try. After so many years together, I knew I owed him, and our marriage, at least that much. Eventually he’d realize it was futile, and then he’d have to let me go.

It was hard at first. I felt I had put my real life in limbo, and was living a lie. I mourned my lost love. The life I imagined spending with him was like a shadow that followed me everywhere. I feared it was a life we might never realize together—at least in this life time. That’s when I wrote the following poem.

The Other

It’s amazing how you multiply as time moves
 Everywhere I see your face appear
 It grows more clear the longer we are parted
Like time itself conspires to bring you near.

Sometimes I feel your presence close behind me
Where I could turn to find you standing there
Turn toward arms pressed close about me
As if mere motion was the answer to my prayers.

Sometimes your presence seems to float before me
Upon a sea of bright tranquility
I watch my soul swept out to meet you
And marvel at mind’s sweet complicity.

Sometimes I feel as if I were a twosome
And one of me moves never far from you,
The other is mere exercise in motion
Eclipsing everything in me that’s true.

Someday I pray that we shall sit together
Before a sea resplendent in the sun
We’ll eat a little morning meal together
Before we rise into new life as one.

Eventually this sense of sadness faded. My husband and I began “dating” again. We spent long leisurely weekends together going to concerts and museums and strolls along the beach. We began cultivating a taste for California wines and listening to jazz music together. We chartered sailboats in the Caribbean and renewed our dream to sail around the world together.

Little by little I began falling back in love with him. It began with a deep respect for how he had reacted when I told him I’d fallen for someone else. There was no anger, no accusations, no recriminations. No jealousy or hurt feelings that I could tell. Never did he hold it against me, or try to make me feel I had wronged him. He absolved me of all blame. All he wanted was the opportunity to prove he was the better man, prove he could love me enough to make me want to stay with him. How could I not love that?

I realized I had deeply underestimated him. He revealed a strength of character and depth of love that I hadn’t realized he possessed. A dignity and humility and gentleness I hadn’t seen before. This was the foundation upon which the renewed love I felt for him grew. And it was the stronger and richer for it.

Now looking back, that period in our marriage seems like an aberration, a mirage almost. I barely remember the name of the man I thought I’d loved, and his bitter assessment of the whole affair—that I willed myself to love him to have the courage to leave—may have the ring of truth.

Despite this happy ending to that episode in our marriage, it wasn’t the last time our love was tested and bent near breaking. But never again without the hope that this too would mend in time and make us stronger. And it did.

Love is the hardest thing we can ever do—love for our spouses, our children, our parents, ourselves, each other. Love for the world we live in. Love for that which created all of this. If we think love’s easy or should be easy, that it won’t have radical mood swings, won’t lift us up and throw us down, won’t drift away when we’re not attentive, won’t wither if we’re not feeding it, or spring back, full and fresh, when we water it with patience and kindness, then we don’t know love at all.  And maybe we can’t know it, until we live it, and let it live in us.

NOTE:  This post originally was supposed to be part of a series of poems I’ve written to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  A way to let a few love poems I’d written long ago see the light of day. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are the first three in the series.  The fifth and final post in the series will be coming soon –”Celebrating Lasting Love.”

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

But I wasn’t content with that. In some fervent way I wanted to be him, become him, live inside him, feel my heart beating in his body and his in mine. I wanted to meld with him.

Not surprisingly, I discovered this just wasn’t happening. There were times when our love felt like that, when we seemed so close, but then it would slacken and drift away. And when that happened, he seemed almost like a stranger to me, someone I barely knew, and did not understand at all.

That’s when I wrote the following poem.

 Love’s Duplicity

I look at you and see
Incredibly
A face at once slighted by closeness, yet
Dimmed by the distance I hold you;
A face overlooked and over known, yet
Laced by fingers, fearful to possess you.
And you look from eyes
Half-halting
Wary that you know me.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How the lines forming you
Flow not into my own
But lie separately, falling
On planes apart.
Reasoning makes no clearer,
No nearer
That we lie two, not one.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How the brown hollow of your eyes
Will ever haunt mine, and
I cry for me, for all whose heart’s desire
Is held ever at half embrace:
Half wanting, half waiting,
Half knowing
What we’ll never know.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How these feelings we are one
Or we should be,
How we are strangers
Never touching,
Lie at odds in me.
Is it odd I reap of love
the bittersweet?

Eventually I realized we weren’t soul mates and probably never would be. And while I still yearned for us to become closer, he was content with the way things were.

While I wanted to know everything about him, there were parts of me—important parts—that he simply had no interest in. Like my passion for the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, writing. He knew I wanted to be a writer—that I wrote poetry and short stories and kept a journal—and he liked that about me. But he had no interest in what I was writing, never asked to read anything. Never seemed interested when I offered to share what I wrote. He wasn’t curious at all.

Finally, I let go trying to become closer, and we drifted away from each other. Our marriage became almost sterile, perfunctory. We shared a house, children, a bed. That was all. I realized that I no longer loved him. At times I barely liked him.

A veil of sadness descended over me, a yearning for something I feared I would never have. I felt my soul mate was still out there somewhere, waiting for me. But I realized I may never find him.

After a while, I knew that I could no longer live like this. It was time for me to leave.

(To be continued)

NOTE:  This is the third post in a series of love poems I’ve written to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  Here are the first two in the series:

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complemented each other. It inspired the following drawing, something I was playing around with at the time, enjoying the lean look of pen on paper.

A Pleasing Design

I find satisfaction in form,
In bare geometric patterns,
In line upon line bisecting line,
In spacious planes spread out and open.

I like this silky stretch of skin,
Simple curves and supple cones,
I like the firm feel of your flesh,
Swollen contours, anxious angles.

Mostly I like the intricate pattern
We create, stripped bare and essential
The piling planes and lacing lines,
The way we meet and mingle,

When one fine ray of you cuts
Clean through me, and within that
intersecting interlude we come
To a common and satisfying point.

By Deborah J. Brasket

Since I wrote this poem,  I’ve learned something of “Sacred Geometry,” which seeks to synthesize the feminine and masculine principles of the discipline.

Medieval representation personified Geometry as a seated woman surrounded by the implements of her art, as depicted in some of the artwork shown  here.

Robert Lawlor in Sacred Geometry – Philosophy and Practice explains:

“Geometry as a contemplative practice is personified by an elegant and refined woman, for geometry functions as an intuitive, synthesizing, creative yet exact activity of mind associated with the feminine principle. But when these geometric laws come to be applied in the technology of daily life they are represented by the rational, masculine principle: contemplative geometry is transformed into practical geometry.”

Several love poems I wrote at the time involves the “topography” or “geography” of love, exploring each other’s bodies as if exploring an intimate landscape, with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing deserts.

Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.

In Exploration

I like the lay of your land.

You stretch before me
in large and rugged proportions.

The sheer volume of your mass
with its vast and varied landscape
is an irresistible invitation
to explore you.

You are shaped of firm and fertile earth
pressed lovingly round solid granite.

I lay my face close to smell
the sweet and salty scent of you
And there I hear
low, deep rumblings
of subterranean waters.

I trace you with my finger to find
Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests,
and parts of you so finely chiseled
I must stop and marvel.

When I touch you my hand spans continents,
for there’s no lusher garden,
no sweeter field,
no depth more resounding,
nor peak more pure
than what I find in touching you.

I rise and hover over you like a cloud
then slowly, gently, cover you with my body.
I feel the touch of skin on skin,
your warmth rising through me
and press so near I hear
Your heartbeat in my body.

I am spilling with the rich fill of you,
Knowing all my sweet and wild secrets lie
Ever open to the finger of exploration.

Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye
a space so vast and distant,
and long to explore
the intangible reaches of your mind.

By Deborah J. Brasket

NOTE:  This post continues a series of love poems that I will be posting to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  The first in the series can be found here: Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

Related articles

• The Meaning of Sacred Geometry (wakingtimes.com)
• Δ Sacred Bodies:sacred Geometries Δ (threecornersdesigns.wordpress.com)
• A Brief Glance at Sacred Geometry (realitysandwich.com)

The first few, shown below, are short and simple, written as a young bride.

In time they grow longer, darker, deeper, exploring the many faces and shapes that love takes as it grows and strengthens, wanes and darkens, matures and celebrates new beginnings.

Now, While

Now
While the love-light of your eyes
Shines upon my face,
And your bare-bodied shadow
Presses close to mine,

Now
With the moonlight and trees
Spreading patterns across our bed,
And the corners of the room
lie dark and drowsy,

Now
Let us kiss and love.

Then
While our bodies still hungrily cling
Let us sleep,

Closely breathing,
Closely dreaming,
Close in love.

Gone

You’re gone!
And though I know
You’ll be back Monday
The word gets caught between
The empty of my arms

Just Asking

We loved
We came to be like
Mirrors, reflecting like

I saw myself
An image in your eye.

When you’re gone
I find myself
And empty likeness

I question, are you gone
Or am I?

Would That Love

Would that love move me once
That it move me far enough
Would that love move me now
In all I do.

For the way is far too strong
That would push against the throng,
Cut me loose to lose myself
In loving you.

Since the day will surely show
When I’ll have to let you go
What a waste to love you then
With clutching arms.

So let me meet your every wish
Make myself a selfless gift
That I fill to overflowing
Loving you.

And when we part, if part we must,
I’ll unclasp in loving trust,
For Love spent us to the full
In every way.

Other Posts that Include My Poetry

Wheeling away on the Isle of Pines

A Scattering of Rocks – Zen in the Garden of Eden

Touching the Wild

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Walking Among Flowers

Night Howls

Swimming Among the Stars

It may be an elemental part of who we are, to see something of ourselves in the world around us. To infuse the other with parts of ourselves.  Chairs have arms and legs, clocks have faces and hands.  Leaves whisper, kites dance, winds caress, storms rage and die.

We think of personification and other rhetorical devices as tools, something we use to describe the world in terms our reader can understand or empathize with.  But maybe it’s more instinctual than that.  Maybe it’s a type of knowing. Knowing the other as ourselves.  Knowing there’s no true separation between ourselves and the world around us.

Perhaps it’s an uncanny acknowledgement of our interconnection and interdependence.  A way of knowing the world as a larger body, or embodiment, of ourselves.

And perhaps by opening that door, we allow the other inside us, where it too finds a larger embodiment of itself, dwelling in our minds, our words, our stories.

“Language is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests,” writes phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible.

David Abram in his Spell of the Sensuous expands upon this idea:

“We regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks.  Yet these are more than mere metaphors.  Our own languages are continually nourished by these other voices—by the roar of waterfalls and the  thrumming of crickets,  It is not by chance that, when hiking in the mountains, the English terms  spontaneously used  to describe the surging  waters of the nearby river are words like “rush,” “splash,” “ gush,” “wash.”  For the sound that unites all these words is that which the water itself chants as it flows between the banks.  If language is not a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily activity born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our discourse has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and rhythms besides those of our single species.  Indeed, if human language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this language ‘belongs’ to the animate landscape as much as it ‘belongs’ to us.”

The more I write, the more I see how language not only shapes the worlds we inhabit, but how that “perpetual interplay between body and the world,” between I and Other, shapes us, our language, and how we know each other.

This all may sound rather mystical, but theoretical science makes similar claims.  Noted physicist Werner Heisenberg once wrote: “What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”  His colleague Niels Bohr echoed that observation:  “It is wrong to think the task of physics is to find out how nature is.  Physics concerns only what we can say about nature.”

The importance of language in shaping not only what we know about the world but what we can know about the world is the subject of Bruce Gregory’s Inventing Reality, Physics as Language.  At the end of his book in which he writes about the work of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and other modern physicists, he concludes:

“Physics shows that while the world shapes us, the language we use shapes the world.  We might even say the language we are shapes the world, for language undoubtedly defines us more profoundly than we can begins to imagine.”

Related articles

• Scientist’s Quotes (aumparasamgate.wordpress.com)
• Eye and Mind (bodyoftheory.com)

I loved the music, the dancing, the clothing, the jewelry, the colorful furnishings of the caravans. I loved what they stood for, the capriciousness of their existence living on the edge of society, their adventuresome spirit, their playfulness and spontaneity, their wildness—all the things we grew up thinking of as gypsy-like. La Gitana symbolized all of that for us. We feminized the masculine gitano and added the lyrical signifier “la” for alliteration, and to show her singular importance. The, not a.

Of course she had to be feminine—all ships traditionally are. They are vessels that serve us, that carry us in her belly, under her wings. Her sails are softly rounded breasts bravely and proudly pulling us onward. And she was alive! So lively with a personality and purpose all her own—a creature, not a thing.

She seemed almost as alive to us as the other creatures that she cavorted with, the dolphins that played at her side, the whales that swam beneath and circled her, the flying fish that landed on her decks. Her spirit was all her own. But her breath, her pulse, her beating heart, her life blood, was us, the people who inhabited and cared for her, plotted her course, walked her decks, stroked her beams, and dreamed her dreams.

It was a symbiotic relationship. We trusted her and sank everything we had into her. And she depended upon us to steer her away from the harbor and allow her to run with the wind, to lead her to a safe haven and hunker her down when the hurricane blew.
Originally she was called “Swagman,” which is what peddlers and tinkers are called Down Under. We bought her from an Aussie living in San Diego who had commissioned her to be built in Taiwan—a Formosa 46, a 46-foot Peterson designed cutter rigged sloop with a center-cockpit. Cousin to the better known and more costly Peterson 44.

We had invested so much more than money in her—our hopes and dreams, our safety and security, our hearth and home, our larger selves. She is what separated us from the sea on those long ocean voyages and moved us through the air by harnessing the wind. Deep in her belly she rocked and sung us to sleep. When the storms rose she sheltered us from the rain. When huge rogue waves came crashing down she lifted us up. When the wind died away and left us floundering in the middle of nowhere, she was the still center in a circle of blue.

I cannot tell you the pleasure and affection I felt when we were ashore and looked out at her waiting patiently for our return. What it felt like to bring our dinghy aside her and hoist our provisions aboard. The thrill of weighing anchor and heading out to sea, raising her sails, watching them fill.

Hunkered beneath her dodger during night watches, I listened to the rush of waves and sails in the black, black night, and watched her mast stirring stars. Sleeping below deck as she rocked with the waves, her rigging humming overhead, the soft gurgle of the ocean whispering through the hull, was sweetness like no other.

I loved sunning my chilled skin on her warm teak decks after a long morning hunting and diving for scallops. Falling asleep in the cockpit on balmy days in port, watching the stars gently rock overhead as she rolled with the soft swells.

How I miss her! But we carry her in our hearts and in our memories, in the words on these pages, and the novels I am writing. I like to think another family has taken over where we left off, hugging her close, and steering her on new adventures.

La Gitana—my larger self.

MORE POSTS ON OUR SEA SAGA

Sea Saga, Part I – Catching the Dream

Sea Saga, Part II – Honeymoon Sail Bailing Water

Sea Saga, Part III – First Stop in Paradise, the Virgin Islands

Sea Saga, Part IV – Ex-pats and Pirates in the Bay Islands of Honduras

The following is such a poem. It was written when we were sailing through the South Pacific and visited Ile des Pins (Isle of Pines) in New Caledonia, a group of islands just south of Sydney, Australia.

The island is well-known for its beauty—glassy, turquoise waves spilling onto sand as white as sugar and fine as flour. Walking ashore was like wading through drifts of powdery snow—each step leaving deep footprints.

The island is covered with tall, narrow native pines.

While walking through these trees, I became mesmerized by the beauty of the island. The sound of wind blowing through the branches, the sun slanting through the leaves, the fragrance of the pine-scented air, the greenness that enveloped me–it all flowed together and seemed to take me to a place beyond myself. Later, remembering how I felt and wanting to capture that,  I wrote this poem.

Ile des Pins

Tree ferns on Isle of Pines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a path
green and thin
that wends away
and wheels me in

Rising, falling,
tree by tree,
lanced by light
through sward and leaf

Breathing pines
that breathe in me
like heady wine
flowing, free

Green above
and green below
no in, no out,
no high no low

Winds are water
everywhere
I walk on water,
float on air

Drifting mindless
round the bend
bursting out
bursting in.

The hypnotic rhythm and rhyme help to capture that sense of being swept away, unable to resist. A deep underlying harmony carries me to a point beyond rational explanation, where the boundaries between self and non-self, this and that, disappear, and something extraordinary just beyond my grasp opens up before me.

Reciting this poem to myself I re-experience that sense of peace and joy and power. And whatever had troubled me before begins to fall away.

What moves you beyond yourself? What resources do you tap into to find a sense of tranquility or renewal?