the cassandra pages

The Sea at Year's End

 Near Palermo, Sicily

At the end of this emotion-filled year, the images that keep returning to me are of the sea.

 Jacksonville, Florida

I'm not an ocean person; I've never lived near the shore. My home has been in the mountains and in pastoral, agricultural landscapes -- and after that, in large cities. Yet I think I've spent more time this year on the edges of the sea than in any other year of my life. I love it, and always have, even though I don't know it very well. And it seems an apt subject for how I feel on this last day of 2017.

 

Cefalù, Sicily

During the dark and difficult times of my life, I try to return to my breath: its pattern, constancy and immediacy help to center me again. The ocean is like that, too, and because of the hours I've spent watching it in so many different temperaments and clothings -- from the rocky Atlantic shores of Atlantic of New England, to the black volcanic sands of Iceland and the North Atlantic, the shell and sand beaches of Florida, and most recently the very different waters of the Mediterranean -- I have new images of ebb and flow, of constancy and immediacy, that I find calming and helpful in the midst of so much that is not.

Rhode Island

Of course the sea also contains death: it bears on it the hopes and bodies of some of the most desperate people on our planet; it's capable of massive destruction; and its very health is endangered just as its rising water threatens human settlement. But that's not what I am thinking of here. It's the hypnotic movement of the waves that has gone on forever and will go on for millennia after we are gone, a movement that has drawn human beings to stop and watch for as long as they have been on the earth: something wilder and vaster than us, full of terror but also full of beauty and mystery that transcend our fear and bid us to watch, to enter, to ride upon it and dive into it.

 Block Island

I need images like these in order to keep going, in order to keep creating, to keep living as a person of joy and optimism in the face of so much that is entirely opposite, to keep trying to bring light to the people and situations I encounter.

Cefalù, Sicily

This has been a terribly difficult year for anyone who thinks and feels. I've made a conscious decision to limit my time on social media, and watching and reading the news, not only because I find much of the discourse toxic, but because it leads nowhere. We need to be informed and involved, but not to the point of losing ourselves. The bright lights in my life continue to be love, friendship and intelligent, searching conversation, the arts, and nature: I am so grateful for them, and look forward to continuing to find ways to communicate and connect as another year opens up to us. Thank you all for being there, and I wish you all the very best for the new year.

 Cefalù, Sicily

By the Sea - 1

We've just returned from ten days on the New England coast, first for the wedding of J.'s sister on the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, then a few days in Boston, and finally a reunion of a few of J.'s college friends on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast between Long Island and Cape Cod. I've come back browner and more relaxed, with several bags of shells, bones and pebbles collected on the various beaches; happy about renewed friendships and new beginnings; and dismayed about political events.

There was a beautiful wedding of two people, both widowed after long, happy marriages, who have found each other now and decided to spend the rest of their lives together.

There was a house full of beloved relatives, above a rocky shell-strewn beach, where we made a party for the whole family one night, and the sun created a spectacle across the bay.

There were long walks on the beach and along the salt marches, with white egrets and gulls, and ospreys carrying fish in their talons, and stranded horseshoe crabs from prehistory, and regular crabs and mussels, and seaweed to nibble on, and the sound of the sea as we fell asleep, and in the night, and when we woke.

And this, from my journal:

One night, a nightmare: a party of friendly strangers turned dark, and I became hunted to the death by Trump's armed henchmen. I woke, tried to dismiss the sticky cobwebs of the dream, fell back asleep only to re-enter the same party, except now the men were strangling the women, one by one.

We're staying on Poppasquash Neck, a small peninsula in Narragansett Bay settled just after the Plymouth Colony was established. Narragansett is an irregular network of rocky coastline, islands, large peninsulas and and these smaller ones known as "necks." The larger Bay, named after one of the two native tribes of this region, has three divisions that the English settlers named Prudence, Patience, and Hope; their main settlement became the city of Providence. But not far from here is the site of the assassination of Matacomet, also known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, who - unlike his conciliatory father - saw the true intentions of the white settlers and went to war against them. The English namers -- my own ancestors were of similar stock and time -- were served well by Prudence, Patience, and Hope, and it's their stone walls and old orchards, white-sailed boats, flag-bunting-festooned old houses, and wealth that have created the visual identity of this place.

The serenity is so studied and so well established it disturbs me, and so I walk on the beach of weathered slipper shells, scallops and quahogs: more comfortable in that graveyard, and the longer timeline of the sea.