Severe Serenity

I have this dream. It comes to me day and night, while I’m doing life’s tasks or sometimes during sleep. It rolls in like a coastal autumnal fog, enveloping me in dense attunement. I’ll no longer be carrying groceries up the seven flights of stairs to my apartment or waiting for the train, I’ll be wading in a tide pool. Sand Beach, Maine. The hour is early, just before my friend dawn wakes. I am barefoot in the shallows of the Atlantic, her calm water swirls around my ankles, hardly making a sound. Mist is wafting off the salted surface, collecting dollops of seafoam in a winded dance. Around me the northern gulls begin to converse, signaling to the sleeping dear on the cliffs, it is time to wake. I’ve beat them to the day’s start, wide awake under the descending moon, waiting for sunrise. I bend over to dip my hands into the ocean only to notice they’re wrinkled and withered, and the hair that hangs around my face is white and wired. I am an old woman, but my spirit is timeless. I have no reservations, and no place to be other than the sea. I think of my dear friend, Mary Oliver, and all the conversations we had with my nose buried in her books. I think of Whitman and his call to solitude. I think of Poe and his colossal awareness of the power above him. I think of Thoreau and his preach about simplicity. I think of me and the life I have led. That’s when I wake. I come back to awareness, my keys jingle the lock on my door or the train arrives, before I reckon if my life has satisfied me. Or rather, if I have satisfied my life. 

I have traveled the stretch of Maine to Acadia National Park once so far in my lifetime, and in that brief stint of memory I came to know her lands as a place that will call out to me for the rest of my existence. Curiously, I scaled boulders and navigated pine mazes. I swam in near arctic temperatures of the Atlantic. I ate blueberries off of branches and spoke to people who have grown up with the trees. Acadia healed something in me that I wasn’t aware need healing. A warm summer hand held my frigid heart as I explored. Explored nature, time, and my own mind. I planted a part of myself in that rock blanketed forest, and I intend on returning to water her seed.

I currently live in New York City in the Lower East Side, in NoLita where Bowery meets Chinatown meets Delancey meets Soho. A lively intersection in the throbbing entity of Manhattan. The city is an ecosystem in itself. Created at Human nature’s hand. The humanity is lost though, at times. I feel most human in the forest. A stark opposition to most of my time being spent in a 400 square foot box stacked on seven stories of neighboring strangers. Air conditioners and sirens drown out the whisper of wind snaking between skyscrapers. Bodies on top of bodies crawl on the side walk, down into the subway system bowels that screech with every turn. The chaos has forced me to retreat internally. I spend my moments swimming in the cool dark pool of my mind these days. The waters in here can be hostile, murky and thrashing, or be as still as glass, reflective and euclid. Treading for sanity is exhausting, I am just trying to catch my breath.

My writing has grown reflective of my internal state – void of time, dreamlike, lyrical, and speculative. It’s as if I am screaming off the top of a plateau in a throat-choking desert. My voice could carry towards the saturated horizon for miles until it turns into a whisper and sinks into the valley, for no one, not even the owls or coyotes, to hear. Pleading into a void. So many questions, so many shapeless ideas in need of molding, so many dreams, so many desires, such a yearn for external peace. This time around, I am calling out. Calling out to the closest thing to religion I’ve ever encountered. Calling out to the severe serenity of landscape. Calling out to the north. Calling out to Acadia. Calling out to that seed of me I planted and left with hope as her sew. I need her to liven, to grow, I need her to answer me.