(In which I demonstrate that I am totally infatuated with Annie Dillard and with the beach)

I don't mean to be an ascetic, but it's in my blood and bone somehow. I don't mean to be disillusioned or disaffected, I don't mean to expect nothing, but the fear of disappointment seeps into me, from the feet up, like water climbing something dry (paper, fabric). Soon I'm soaking wet, when only my toes were ever touching the sea.

I need to snap out, snap open like a sweet peapod bursting and showing its seeds into the light. I need to wake from the dreams of distance. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek speaks for me:

"Our God shall come," it says in a psalm for Advent, "and shall not keep silence; there shall go before him a consuming fire, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred up about him." It is the shock I remember. Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.

I have glutted on richness and welcome hyssop. This distant silver November sky, these sere branches of trees, shed and bearing their pure and secret colors--this is the real world, not the world gilded and pearled. I stand under wiped skies directly, naked, without intercessors. Frost winds have lofted my body's bones with all their restless sprints to an airborne raven's glide.

Winter is the season for feeling that clean and cold, but the frigid Pacific and the chilling fog give me winter in the midst of summer. This purity is the prize, for surrender to the sea. This wakefulness is the reward, this out-of-body experience. The cold crashes over me, splashes in my eyes, tangles in my hair: every thought is washed out of my mind. I come running out of the waves, so awake that my body itself is a dream, dissolving in the bed of the world, when I am awake in the morning of joy.

Seashore

Blue poured down from the sky and spilled into the water, and the water spilled onto the shore. It flowed up the sand, easily, and glided back down, like a comforting hand on a familiar back, sliding up and down. The sand, having been lapped so many times, took on the water's rhythm. The sand's surface mirrored the water's, only with much slower waves. My bare feet pressed into the mud-ripples. I almost regretted disrupting their calm march, but the soft sand felt so good on the soles of my feet. My stillborn regret vanished like the seawater soaking into the sand.

And the waves licked the shore again, and again. The water rose around our legs, and we sloshed through the tide as the sun turned the sea to silver and fire. The water kissed the sand and ran away, and crept back for another embrace--and eased away again--and slid forward again, and then back--and then forward, again, again. We splashed on: shoes in his left hand, sandals in my right; my dress dancing with the wind, his rolled-up jeans fearing the water that swirled around us. The waves and shore kept parting and rejoining. Meanwhile, our hands flowed together, our movements mirrored each other, like the sand-patterns shaped to the sea's caress while the sea's flow reflects the sand.

3am Despair

The party is raging outside my window, a few stories down. Whistling and shouting mingle with the insistent background pounding--drunken drums, throbbing like a heartbeat from a car stereo.

I can't sleep. I am so frustrated. I shouldn't be awake right now, shouldn't have been awake for the past several hours. But I can't make myself go to bed because I haven't gotten anything done. It feels like a waste of the lost sleep if I give up without figuring out what is broken.

I pin my identity on every problem. Then the problem runs away from me, and I chase after it, because I am tied to it. I grow weary of running, but cannot stop. The problem pulls me onward... When the solution eludes me--slipping through the shadows, dancing in the darkness (like the smokers partying outside)--I feel abandoned and lost. I've come so far, but arrived nowhere.

Meanwhile, the music outside ebbs and flows like the tide, like the ocean. It washes over me, but I can't swim tonight. The pounding waves of sound break over my head. I gasp, and breathe in saltwater. Choking, I kick myself to the surface, just in time for another wave.

The person I wanted to be stands on the shore, silently watching. Is she smiling, laughing even, as I flail? Impossible to tell from this distance, with the water spraying in my face, the salt in my eyes. I want to scream, but the sea rots my voice. Only a gurgle escapes me.

Another wave comes, and another.

Maybe one of them will sweep me, kicking and coughing, into sleep.

Spring Rain

The prayer I want to have always pouring through my heart:

Let us acknowledge the Lord.
Let us press on to acknowledge Him.
As surely as the sun rises, He will appear;
He will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.
(Hosea 6:3)

I feel the spring coming, at long last. After the snow, the rain fell and washed away the illusion. Spring rain or winter rain? Who cares, so long as the rain waters the earth! The rain waters me, too, though I don't absorb it with the grace of the trees. I can't drink the rain, and it doesn't nourish my body. But I am umbrella-less this year--I am soaking in the rain. It seeps into my skin, and I feel as drenched as the earth. Footsteps on my skin would squish.

I want to be that soaked in God's presence.

Come, like the sun and like the rain, like warmth and water, like light and cloud. Rain and sun together make the world so bright, polished and gleaming and reflecting. Every puddle mirrors the sky, every tree is lacquered. Raindrops like rhinestones refract the light from every leaf and stem. Even the buildings are rejuvenated, washed clean.

In the rain, I am cold and sorrowful, clenched into myself (though really I am leaking into the world and the world is seeping into me, with each sliding droplet). But the sun appears and its rays split me wide open and I spill out into the sky.

Come, sun and rain, and make me into a rainbow.

Water

This morning, the drops of water hung on the ornamental grass by the sidewalk, like tiny beads of silver or glass. Pearly light drifted down through the clouds and landed on the water droplets. The light's caress polished them. They gleamed. Dangling, luminous, they transformed the grass, cast a spell over the whole scene.

That ephemeral beauty stopped me in my tracks. But the path shook me along, past the enchanted grasses, and I went about my day. The sun and wind dried the grass back into ordinariness. But the water still glimmered in my mind. If I could, I would wear a necklace of those water drops (shining in the fog, soft as the morning air), and I would ignore all the world's diamonds.