Ocean - October 25, 2010

I am in love with the Ocean

Lifting her thousands of white hats

In the chop of the storm,

Or lying smooth and blue, the

Loveliest bed in the world.

In the personal life, there is

Always grief more than enough,

A heart-load for each one of us

On the dusty road. I suppose

There is a reason for this, so I will be

Patient, acquiescent. But I will live

Nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting

Equally in all the blast and welcome

Of her sorrowless, salt self

I have read studies that show certain personality types are more attune to one landscape or ecological system than others. Some people’s physiology and perhaps too their cultural and family systems, do better by the ocean. Others come alive in the mountains. Perhaps if you are neither of these kind of people, the deserts? The topics? Maybe, grief does come to us all and we come to accept this. In this, though there might also be a choice. Where might we find the trust that we belong to the beauty around us? Let’s go ahead, and if we can, make it in some ways as easy as we can and live where we are comforted and held. Maybe this is the rocking of the ocean, the lofty vision of the mountains, the clear crisp unclutteredness of the dessert, or the warm embrace of the tropics, whose very air seems to support the heaviest burden.

I also know that beauty is everywhere, and in every landscape. We don’t need to choose to go beauty, beauty is with us always. I once lived in Newhall, California. It was the dry desert of Los Angeles county rimmed with smog and ram shackle strip malls. I so despaired of living there. Once, a number of my work colleagues went to see a movie wherein the film a woman committed suicide by jumping out of a sky scraper window, dramatically shattering her life as she did the same to the car on which she landed. My fellow veterinarians quipped, “Someone just told her she had to move to Newhall.” My boyfriend at that time, native to LA Country, was deeply offended. Somewhere in the discussion and in the later months, perhaps to honor him and maybe all of life, I committed myself to loving where ever I was, to find beauty where I may. This has mostly worked even in the harshest climes: to love the beauty before me, and also to choose to go towards beauty. Let’s all be easy and hard on ourselves, shall we?

Where kind of terrain calls to you to live and love by?