Tall Ships on the Horizon

I watched the ferry fill with cars and people anxiously, in deep angst that there wouldn't be enough room left for me to come aboard. Though entry into my teen years had brought a noticeable seachange toward successes, I still had tracers of earlier imprints of 'missed boats," -- me standing on the shore, as the ferry-boats left frothy wakes behind them like giant fishtails. Examples? — “Born too late”—to marry “Sexy Rexy” (Sir Rex Harrison—English Actor)—he was born in 1908, myself in 1951—when I was 12, he was 55; “born too early”—in 1967 they still hadn’t developed interstellar space travel, except on Star Trek (it’s now rolling into 2016, and they still haven’t figured that out.)

While we can literally ‘miss a boat,’ we can still catch a water taxi; take the next ferry . . . It is not the disaster I once considered it. Actually, I’ve found that ‘missing the boat’ can often be an unexpected blessing silvering into our lives: Had I remembered, at age 60, that I had widow’s benefits available, instead of 2 years later at age 62, I might still be financially eking-by in Arizona. Instead, "exiling" here to the Midwest, I am graced financial equilibrium as I joyfully prepare for my return to my beloved saltwater and desert environs; all-the-while, soaking in soul-deeping spiritual soup here in the heartland, that will forever bless me.

In my earlier years, the ‘boat missing' scenario really rang true for me—I had accumulated a lengthy list of grievances against boats that had left me behind. I lived in that story, and I found lots of 'evidence' to 'prove' it. This was a series of decades when I didn’t believe in any ‘beyond’ past my points of grief: beyond my 16 years as an Arizona tour guide, beyond my late husband’s death in 1996, beyond the storm-steeped Magi-sea-a of a teen boy’s lightening-silvered eyes, tempest ceiling giving way to the swirling stars in our heads, standing together in the froth of Yemonja’s angry surf—and the soul-fissuring event of his later departure.

Sailing the briny inner and outer seas, however, eventually dispels the sense that our only good is in our past: draws us, in spite of our resistance, into new stories, new adventures, healing us into something more than what we were. We are quickened anew—we love again, get curious again; laugh again--even at our dogged resistance to do so. We get it into our heads that "to heal is to betray," -- to betray the love we shared, a loyalty we embraced. It is not so. Changes in the present, including the renewal of joy, are not a dismissal. There is much ‘beyond’ our past, beyond who we were, our charted waters; and our confounding habit of always looking behind us for our zeniths (a lot of us live like that.) We develop a false penance for that which we do not forgive, in others and/or ourselves; we become tenacious in clinging to the emotional debt we create for ourselves and the stories of why that should be so.

 

There comes a time, however, without discounting or disparaging our pasts, that the briny winds and saltwater seas wash our spirits clean: we bring our gazes forward, to contemplate what is now arriving to us from across the waters, piquing our interest: something tantalizing carried in on the winds; a Tall Ship crests the sea’s horizon, then comes to port. We get the audacity to come on board. We are ushered to the ship's wheel. Silvered Intuition swings its leg over the railing and comes to stand with us at the helm, steering us out to sea, our breath catching upon the return of inner stars--our inner compass needle pointing True North.

 

Asked at this cusp of the New Year to write a letter to myself of what is now wanting to birth inside of me, and planned exercises to support that process, I sat down to the task--anticipating the familiar listing of New Year resolutions and brief narrative bursts of my goals and objectives for the coming year. Got something different: instead of a list of events, behavior changes, circumstances and situations that I wished to achieve (I still harbor those), what presented on paper was skipping-stones of energy-states I wish to seed into the waters of this coming year: rhythmic, poetic, curious, inspired, resilient, energetic, focused, on-point, fleet-footed, cat-agile; living in my soul-soup, silken;

 

free to be messy and soot-footing around in the charcoal of my creative fire—dancing in the flames of a series of beach bonfires, roasting possibilities by the water’s edge, loosing whoops of joy into the stars.

This is exceedingly different from any previous New Year’s resolution lists or narratives — inviting unexpected gains, encounters and considerations to wander in, pull up a driftwood chair, shoot the breeze into the night of possibilities--of soulutions, Intuition flanks me at the helm, I am sailing into the Mystery of Becoming, no longer land-locked, but sea-bound. Joy and ensouled intrigue the compass; map-making supplies below deck.

 

Tall Ships on the horizon!!!