SEA BECKON, Sea-ing the possibilities

Leaning ‘gainst the port railing, arms akimbo: I rise up, a beckoning teasing the edges of my hearing—my eyes scanning the Mesmer-flicker mirror of the sea, searching . . . what? Mysteries, possibilities, becoming-s . . . the urge to inform myself (to form myself within) through forming myself into something new becomes paramount, priority.

There is a saying:

God can only do for us what God can do through us.

      — author unknown

Another saying:

Let go, and allow in.

—author unknown

So--question is: Will we allow ourselves to be amazing? To step out of bounds—out of outdated, limiting, restrictive, land-locked perceptions of how, and who, we are--can be; allow fresh briny breezes to blow into our scent-ual awareness , tantalizing scents, of what we’re becoming; in spite of ourselves; our own resistances.

Author Alan Cohen, narrates in his book, A Daily Dose of Sanity, that student, George Dantzig, upon arriving late to his U.C. Berkley math class, copied down the two problems on the board, assuming they were homework. Solving them, he turned them in to the professor at his next class and, the next morning George’s professor was pounding on his door: George had solved two classically unsolvable math problems!

Alan’s point, of that day’s reading, February 17^th, was that at times ignorance of what is “impossible” allows us to step right through walls of time-honored restriction, through waves of cultural resistance, breaching a strictly adhered limitation.

The harder limitations to shake are our own self-defined restrictions: we live in our own soup, most often convinced that it’s just the way things are. A second layer of this can come from familial assumptions: unlike many, I don’t have this familial layer to undo if I become a new me;—my family of origin dissolving years ago.

I’ve been blessed to live in several states, and, one of the blessings of new territories is that they don’t have you “pegged,” they don’t have any images of what you’re like from ‘way-back-when’—so, you don’t get any “That isn’t like you,” flack. Change in familial units can often feel threatening to the individual members who have developed emotional charges and attachments to having other family members filling a certain slot, being defined a certain way. That can happen even if they’re no longer in your life, if you still roll the same “film-strips” in your mind and heart.

So how do we get our own permission to change; into something we haven’t been before. Some of it comes from the inspiration of others: we become enchanted or intrigued by someone: sometimes it can be difficult to sort out if we’re really attracted to someone because we like them, or because we want to be them!

However, we also have an organic unfolding of soul-silk, the unfurling of a satin wave. We feel that Siren call from out across the seas of our awareness. We long, yearn to go to it. Question is, will we allow it.

Allow vs. permission: hmmm. Looking at the words: allow, I initiate; permission, I seek. So, there are two stages to it. First I seek my own permission to change, or grow, and then I allow it. I let it in. I try it on for size; I become it.

My creative energy tends to be organic, wild, sometimes messy, in a nest of basic order. Like the tides, the visual mediums around me surge and recede—natural objects; images of the sea or high desert, people’s faces, structural features of ships, homes, or a fan of clothing and textile images, featuring rich organic textures and color palettes.

And then, every so often, I need to bring it all down to a clean white slate, to clear the decks. Think: unmarked sand, un-trodden snow; or painting words on water. It usually arrives me because I've been praying for it. Something in me has been wishing that something would force me to pare down; that would require me to initiate a 'thinning.' I need that fluidity, the flexibility; the freedom to go with my own flow, to swim out to what is unfolding in me, to the surprise of me—the part that I don’t know yet: I’ve shucked down to undies, slipped through the railing, over the side, stroking out to what I’m becoming—drenched in curiosity; a sea-soup of greater possibilities.

Salient Saline Ponderings

Back in 2010, in one of our Photoshop class assignments, we were furnished a gray-scale image of the sea, to "shop." As I worked with this, the mystique of living in a universe that offers us the distinct lenses of day and night presented in the imagery.


As this imagaic metaphor unfurled, I was impressed with how incredibly lush it is that we live in a world that provides daily seachanges: internally, externally; echoed in the pulsing of tides, the rhythm of our breath, illumined by the sky-lanterns: sun, moon, stars, and the mirror of the sea.

Intuitive Sees

Deep-see diving into intuitive sense, there is a rich sea of perspective on the mystique, and the effectiveness, of Intuition as a mode of being here on this planet. Traditionally, intuition is seen as an occasional visitor, gossamer, like a muse. I have an intuition that it is rather how we are wired to be here; like our breathing, we come equipped with lungs. As we are equipped for oxygen, so are we equipped for Intuition--its in our blueprint:


"It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it, and rely on it. It is my partner."

Dr. Jonas Salk



This captures that that sense of Intuition joining us at the ship's wheel, pointing our way, as we navigate the seas of our lives, new vistas opening before us, a deep trust and dependence upon the intuitive process growing us into a sort of muscle-memory of the spirit:


"Most of us are living at the periphery of consciousness intuition invites us into the center."

Willis Harmon



We are drawn into the center of the Net--a spiritual Internet:


"Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it is all written there."

Paulo Coelho

and:


"A mystical experience is simply a prolonged intuition."

Paul Brunton

Intuition is also intelligent; not just good at timing. Repeatedly, master of surprise, I've been astounded by Intuition's wry Wit!--a swashbuckling sense of humor, that has our best interests at heart: Intuition comes a court'n, uh-huh.

Sea Swoon

Reading these words, first time: First sentence raises hairs on my arms; visceral SWOON. The very word ‘swoon’ saturates me, attendant sensorial pulses mambo dipping me. Waves slide over me, catching me in palpable push-pull tides.  

Hairs up again—quivering: 5th paragraph; 3^rd sentence; begins:  

swoony as the sea . . .  

 

Follows a poem, by poet extraordinaire:  Diane Ackerman 

 

Whale Songs 

 

Speaking in storm language,

a humpback, before it blows

            lows a mournful ballad

in the salad-krill sea, murmurs

deep dirges; like a demiurge,

it booms from Erb to Santa Cruz,

bog low, its foghorn a thick liqueur.

 

Crepe black as a funeral procession,

the pod glides, mummer-deft,

through galloping brine,

each whale singing the same

runaway, rounded tune:

 

Dry finger rub, drag, drub

a taut balloon. Glottal stops. Pops.

dry fingers resume, then, ringing

skeletal chimes, they ping

and rhyme—villanelles, canticles,

even a Gregorian done on ton tongues

 

as trapped below the consciousness

of air, hungry, or wooing

or lamenting slaughter,

jazzy or appalled,

they beat against the wailing wall

of water, voices all

in the marzipany murk they swim,

invisible but for their sons.

 

And often they raise high

as angels’ eyes a refrain

swoony as the sea, question-mad,

sad, all interrogatives, as if

trying to fathom the fathomless

reach from ladle-shaped ocean,

scurrilous surf, to breach-birth

upon beach and blue algae’s cradle.

 

Sleek black troubadours

playing their own pipes, each body

a mouth organ, each shape a daguerreotype

of an oblate friar caroling,

they migrate, glad to chain rattle

and banshee moan, roaming the seas

like uneasy spirits, a song on their bones.