The big 3-0 came and went... and with it came a tattoo and a sense of maturity. I feel different. It might sound crazy, but I do. One thing that came with this year, this change, this move, this inner growth... is a renewed passion and love for the beach. It's always been there, but this past year it grew. And so with a needle and wave, I cemented the simplicity and curve of the ocean into my heart, and around my wrist.
The kids long for the beach too, and so even when we are sick {as the kids are this week} we still manage to go a few times a week. Earlier in the week it was sunny and the autumn sunshine bore down on us while we collected treasures. It was heavenly.
And then today, amid sniffles and rain drops we dawned rain boots and slickers and went a little north to find a rocky beach that holds memories and surfers and time. Paige gathered so many rocks in her bag that she was as unsteady as her previous newly walking self who toddled across this same rock walk with a hand outstretched for balance. Today it was outstretched to show a palm full of rocks. Her cheeks puffed as they get with the sniffles, reminded me again of a younger version of her.
The outing today was largely due to Fynn. His recent spurt in creativity has my head spinning. Yesterday and today he took apart the easel to use it for spare parts of another vision. Seriously. Unscrewed and used limbs of the easel. Lord help me. Between his excitement over taking things apart, and Paige's new found love for Bernita the imaginary lion who happens to be a fabric cutting board... my mind needed the sea today.
My mom sent me Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, and I'm reading it very very slowly and highlighting nearly entire pages. While parts are dated {it was written in the 1950's} the majority of the book is timeless. A women's struggle to find balance and creativity and solitude while taking part in raising children and a home and being a part of community. One section that I've been thinking about since I read it talks about the importance of getting time alone:
"When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.
It is a difficult lesson to learn today - to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. For me, the break is the most difficult. Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It is like an amputation, I feel. A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm. And then, like the star-fish, one grows it anew; one is whole again, complete and round - more whole, even, than before, when the other people had pieces of one."
And while I understand what she's saying, and agree completely, I also understand that taking that break is not always a choice one has. And so today, when I needed it, when a rock was shoved in the dustbuster opening hard enough to have it possibly never come out... I knew what we needed. What I needed. And there, at the ocean I can find solitude while with the children. Lindbergh also wrote: ""No man is an island," said John Donne. I feel we are all islands - in a common sea." I adore that sentiment.
My common sea is vast and welcoming.
And when it beckons, I can't help but run to it wildly.
