Hark, now hear the sailors cry
smell the sea, and feel the sky
let your soul & spirit fly,
into the mystic.
~Van Morrison
~~~~~
…i grew up by the beach, every summer ~ at home there more than home ~ find my peace and silence there, walking mornings in the fog, jogging through the years with soundtracks of memories that persist into the next. to dunkin donuts at dawn ~ the ritual of the line where french is spoken, contact is made, and we choose our given flavor that changes through the years ~ from hazelnut to vanilla, toasted almond, mocha, now heath and almond joy. in shots and swirls ~ i choose, because i can and because i can’t back home where coffee is coffee, americano, latte, cappuccino. i like it here because i walk to freedom and can decide what i want without thinking and over thinking because there is no other choice. here there are stuffies of minions and unicorns and i pick the one and it’s mine. i like it here because there is pizza at mario’s or calzone at rocco’s and fried dough is fried dough with sugar and cinnamon or not. dinner is lobster, steamers, fried clams, or pizza and pier fries. and cotton candy is pastel-y pink and soft and melts and disappears on my tongue. the simplicity of it all makes life simple, and sweet. and i run and run; and once and awhile i walk, when i have to, or want to, and my mom joins along. searching for sand dollars and moments of ocean in glass and rocks and seaweed. i want this for them ~ from one year to the next, they grow and become themselves even more. they grow and find themselves in doing nothing, against the backdrop of blue in sea and sky, every year in the soothing crash of the waves that go on and on and right there the hum hum humming silences the noise of outside, beyond the borders of the beach…
~~~
“My soul is full of longing / For the secret of the sea, / And the heart of the great ocean / Sends a thrilling pulse through me.”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
~~~~~~~
…the salt, the air, the sweet smell of sea, breezes windy into stillness that never ends.
never ending waves that sound all surf and swell,
lingering fog that clears to see far and wide.
the pier ahead, each year i grow, and now i watch them ~
in heat and sweat and rain and mist, between pool and ocean, they giggle…
When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come,
I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds,
cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue…For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” ~ rebecca solnit
“So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach,
which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts
seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”
~ Virginia Woolf
~~~~~
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea. -e.e. cummings
“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar,
and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” ~ Carl Sandburg
