still life and stirring

I have an unexpected hour-and-a-half of solitude in my lap this morning, and I find myself wandering the streets and beaches of this tiny seaside town, alone with my thoughts and the little sounds of life carrying on its business all around me.

I'm sitting on a rough-hewn, weather-worn bench out on a wharf, the air alive with nature's industry. Below me, a seagull sits on a platform, going at a cockle with every bit of strength in his beak, in an earnest pursuit of his breakfast. Out in the cove, the water is at low tide and as still as memory; several birds of varying descriptions are bathing themselves noisily, and I peek over the wharf's old wooden railing to see a snow-white seagull whishing his face back and forth in the water over and over. I wonder if it feels delicious. Wings are flapping in the air around me as the gulls and cormorants and pigeons and an occasional heron all wing their way around the docks, picking off the the smorgasbord of fresh seafood exposed by the ebbing of the tide.

The scene down in the tide flats is a cacophony of life, all jumbled together, growing off of one another, tangled and inextricable, except by the sharp and persistent beaks of the water birds. Clusters of mussels congregate in the hundreds of thousands on the barnacle-studded rocks, and thousands of tiny crabs, no bigger than a nickel, scuttle around surreptitiously as they scavenge for tiny bits of food. The spiky green cushions of sea urchins are poking up everywhere, and a welcome sight this year is the celebrated return of the sea stars, all plump and glumpy, easing back into existence and making a comeback after a mass die-off in the past couple of summers.

I remember with a faint twinge of pity at the day 4 years ago when I had a big dream of living here, and it looked like the light was going right out of it for good. What abject misery I felt--what disillusionment and grief and sorrow and distrust. I'm reminded today that all journeys see dark days, and that great and beautiful things can lie beyond them.

--Teri.

my undiscovered country

I'm 39.5 years old, staring down the barrel of my 40th birthday and making some decisions about how I want to be rounding that corner when it comes. Gravity has always been strong, and it pulls at me with the whisperings of this-is-as-good-as-it-gets and it's-all-downhill-from-here. They say deep calls to deep, and for me, it's the deep-dark spiral of human frailty calling out to the bone-deep fatigue that finds it origins in the broken butterfly at my throat. Give into the gravity. Go gracefully into the night. Succumb.

But I don't wanna.

And it's because I've begun to find my undiscovered country. I'm learning a new and unfamiliar language and unlearning some of the old words that no longer describe the terrain. After all these years, words like "slow" and "can't" and "stretched-out" are being supplanted by a new vocabulary--weird words like "glycogen" and "endurance" and "will". The landscape is beginning to shift and change in ways I never thought possible, and the view keeps getting more and more interesting and surprising to me. Kicking against the goads of gravity for the past several months has begun to shape my legs, and where there was once the pudginess of post-childbirth mid-life motherhood, I'm noticing sinew and muscle and a strength I've never before had. These legs have carried me now across a significant finish line, and they want to do it again. And again. They want to move faster and keep shaping and sculpting the new landscape of my middle age, until I pull across the finish line of my 39th year, an entirely new person in an entirely new world, breathing a new atmosphere where gravity is weaker than me.