Life is a grand ol’ lady-man bound hard for high trouble and low pain, her bold strapping curves rimmed from the outset by our soul-sick desires and spirit-plundering needs and the evanescing relations we yearn so to make and secure but cannot.
Some days s/he rides easy astride all nearsome seas and we coast sweetly by, lured into pleasures benign, amaranthine, while on other days s/he flings mighty roiling waves across us bow to stern, whipping ruddy decks clear of debris, rigging, gear, mud, and us, too, on occasion. In either instance—sweet or hank sailing—it is all too easy to lose our footing and find ourselves off the last boat we called home, reaching for something we know not how to name much less touch. To sally on is failproof, a non-singular grace of existence, breathing in to the very last end no matter what and counting on life alone to haul the next exhale into itself—right to the one moment that it doesn’t—come what may.
Whether we know it or not, feel it or don’t, value it or could not care less, we all stand at the ready in neck-high seas every day, our whole lives little more than single droplets in storm-embowelled walls of tall water. In the gurgling eddies given at random to those born to this world, we can rest and float and forget and story the spin-drifted lot as we flow or surf or are dragged back kicking strong into yon fray, our anchors pulled because we said so or not or something in between and us headed for blue water or not or somewhere beyond in these oh so fierce or placid seas. This is our one colossal recurring miracle, I believe, and worth remembering for one Throwback Thursday: how we all manage—even when we may feel most unready—to stay at the ready, come what may.
Photo of me rafting the Snake River in Wyoming, months after my children were abducted for the first time.
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