See fairer

I've never thought much of water.

For some reason, when I was a child I had no problems with the sea. I kept close to the sand but I would find the waves so playful and risky - you'd never know exactly hard they would hit your ankles and if your pants would get wet! I would love to stand in the wet sand and be hit by wave after wave, thoroughly enjoying the sinking feeling as the water shifted the coarse sand between my toes.

The older I got, the more forbidding the ocean became. The waves became reaching hands, the cooling color the hue of cold, breathless eternity. Beachcombing treasures gradually became chemically saturated junk - either invertebrate carcasses or careless trash.

The ocean has another meaning for me as an adult, no doubt stemming from this fear. Falling, drowning, being tossed high and low and feeling helpless against an unconquerable influence.

I do this to myself, though. There is no doubt. With the giant changes of the last few weeks I knowingly pulled the blindfold over my own peepers and jumped right off the plank. Kersploosh! And in the exciting riptide of life there are those highs and lows and the swirl of motion that, at times, makes it so hard to breathe.

While I hang on and wait to find the rhythm in the passage, I think about what Annie had told me: "To venture into some instability, it's ideal to rock the boat in just one area while you have strong ropes tied to shore." And there is my ocean, indeed it is all around me.


Even in silence it is so hard to find silence. I'm looking back amongst the last quarter of year, and so much has happened. What I thought was imbalance was really just the inability to savor a good moment. Different parts of me with warring loyalties, fractured commitments, panic for time that was slipping away. When so much happens the mind clicks into overdrive, but while each frame flicks faster and faster into the past you can't quite catch it all before the reel is empty and it's gone.

Now all I have are those little colored tiles that appear in a sea of clear black. They are my mosaic and I play with them, change them around, move them from my desktop to my galleries and try to find the patterns between the squares. They're there, but no one but me can see it. And when I think about those (short?) days I realize how much I took for granted. I miss the clear air, the stress that I created myself, and most of all the fact that no matter how much I worried about A, B, or C, no one but me suffered the consequences. There is luxury in knowing that, which is what separates the pressure I feel these days with the anxieties of that brief week.


I miss the ocean now, and wish we could smell the sea. There are so many hidden treasures beneath the waves, sometimes completely unreachable due to the quickness of a tide or the frigid depths. Now I realize that so many more things remain hidden simply because we don't give ourselves the time to "see." None of the things I remember from Scotland are in my photos, which as jarring as the first day I laid eyes on white sand and turquoise water. Are they lost forever? We take photos to preserve the moment but if we fail, then what?

Today I am unsure of if I have come to terms with the frightening ocean or have become so immersed in it that I have just learned to cope. The little island of Mull found me surrounded by the sea and was, in so many ways, a test of that faith.


I'm writing the story here, and the ink isn't even dry.