Sometimes what we need is not necessarily to
explore new waters, but rather to re-sea/see;
to see newly what we assume we already ‘know’ about ourselves—to look deeper, with newly garnered wisdom.
There is a certain sense of safety, even ego satisfaction, in assuming that
something is “in our past,” – that we’re done; finished with it; no longer
warranting any further investigation; ceasing to hold any intrigue for us, viewed
as something already charted and explored, drifted to the bottom of our
consciousness, sitting, long-time unopened, half buried in the sandy bottom of
our awareness, hasps rusted shut.
So—this is an invitation to dive deep, and unearth that old
chest, bring it to the surface, loose the hasps and sift for missed treasures—for
what may not have been fully breathed, fully lived: orphans of your spirit—not
all of them necessarily sealed off by trauma or dramatic events; sometimes just
slipping away from our focus, our awareness as other things took precedence.
Sometimes, as illustrated in the 2000 movie: Woman on Top, starring Penelope Cruz, Murilo Benicio and
Mark Feuerstein, we need a complete break from what is no longer working, along
with the freeing idea that we’re never going back—that we are, indeed, done
with it. Convinced of that, we let ourselves explore, become more than what we
knew, suddenly freed of what had become stifling; suffocating.
However, when we trade out what has been for what we are
becoming, breaking free into our larger selves, we can end up leaving behind
deep, rich parts of ourselves, parts that are still of vibrant value when
growth and adjustments are made. Often, in this throw-away culture, it never
occurs to us that we can retrieve something good from our past, or that we’d
want to.
With, perhaps, years and miles between the ‘us’ of then, and
the ‘us’ of now—there may be, to our great surprise something that beckons from
the past, something radiant and beautiful, that yet shines for us, from the
depths, from below the tides of our now daily lives; not realizing that we have
become the Something New that was needed in
that old circumstance. Is there something worth bringing up from the sea of
your past experience, something worth retrieving and blowing back into it the breath
of life, something that wasn’t fully experienced, because you were not really
ready, then, because you had to go away to grow into it?
‘Orphan’ can be interpreted as “unsupported,” that which was
never ‘fed’. It can also be interpreted as “free.” Free to explore; free to
reconsider something that will feed your sea-soul. Khalil Gibran captured this:
“If though has two loaves of bread, sell one and buy
white hyacinths for thy soul.” Sometimes what will feed our soul is to break
through our own traditional interpretations of our past; things dismissed, discounted;
or even let go of because they were considered out of reach, unavailable at the
time. One of the things most difficult for us is to let go of old conclusions:
to reconsider something we rejected, or just let slip through our fingers, and
re-evaluate it; re-interpret the situation, the circumstance.
An unknown author comments: “Before
you can break out of prison, you must first realize you’re locked up.”
Our most confining jail can be the places we feel most sure of in
ourselves—places where we are stuck in our interpretations; glued even, to a
particular evaluation of something, it never even occurring to us to question
it.
The New Year is a time of resolutions and evolutions—and,
now, in my book, reevaluations. A
little over two years ago, I came to this no-sea of the state of Missouri, heartland
of the U.S.— with riches of its own; however completely landlocked—dry of any sea,
at any time, ancient or recent. Geologic history indicates there never has been
saltwater here. This extreme of not even a hint of the sea called me inward, to
my Inner-Sea, seeking nourishment of the Sea Mother, to resume with her a
deeper appreciation, respect and resonance, a renewal. Pushed by this no-sea, in
2018 I will return to the Pacific Northwest I had left behind, in a new
location within that—with a now world-seasoned appreciation of what I left
behind. Sometimes, it takes a lot of “far-ing,” in my case: over 27 years and
1800 miles of distance, before I was ready to look back and consider what it
was that I was so sorely missing. Pushed
by the extremity of land-locked-ness here, I found myself hunting my needle to
mend my fishnet, a sewing—and within it, a sowing: the seed of an idea to
return to the sea—a reinstatement of a part of my nature I had been ignoring
for many years; a return, a recognition of something for which I was not fully
ready before this no-sea experience brought home to me the yearning inside me for
the Sea-Mother; and the hidden gifts I had orphaned: the girl with drawing
pencils in her hand, tablet perched on her knees, cool waves silking her toes;
the young adult bundled against buffeting winds sharing wine, French bread and
fresh-caught crab with a friend at a weathered picnic table as the waves
crashed like cymbals against the rocks.
Sometimes we need to go away, so we can come back of our own
choosing, rather than it just being where we happen to find ourselves. For me,
this is call to congruency, a matching of my inner and outer worlds, restoring
me to a new balance and harmony between bodily presence and spirit intrigued.
This is a call to letting the tides wash me clean of conflictedness, of having
my innards and outers match, to re-growing my mer-tail, consciously swimming
with the currents of my psyche, into a new, richly embellished Tale of my
choosing; finding, fathoms under what had become my daily consciousness, a self
I no longer knew existed, revealing a richer, more vibrant life-current than I
ever ere imagined.
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