It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

-from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

There are so many stories to tell she isn’t quite sure where to begin. Lately she’s been waffling about where and how and when to best tell her stories, and which stories need to be told at all.

Sometimes she feels as if she’s hoarding her happiness, keeping so much sacred and soft and to herself, but then that isn’t entirely true, isn’t probably true at all, because she’s been told she radiates joy even when she isn’t climbing mountains to sing at the top of her lungs. She’s been told she has light behind her eyes even when she isn’t dancing from moment to moment, skipping merrily from mile to mile, each step revealing words and plans and looks and trips and bellies full of laughter.

She wants to tell you about epic road trips, whaleslap weekends, saturated spring breaks. About ground nut stew and soft green trails, accidental sunburns and mothers who bake blueberry muffins and talk with happy tears in their eyes. She could cheerfully regale you with stories about her preferred ring-toss stance (unconventional and yet effective!), how poorly she plays bean bag toss (and how she refuses to call it “corn-hole”), high-fives and bike rides. She wants to tell you about brewery tours (she could this minute write a compelling ode to Scotch Ale), meeting new friends who instantly felt like old ones, easy conversation with nary a trace of small talk, how much she’s missed artichokes.

She wants to tell you about twenty miles run and years of loss undone by legs turning over even when they wanted to scream, wanted to cling to doubts about their ability to careen along trails unexpectedly unfriendly. She wants to tell you about cramping calves and a high-ten she almost collapsed in, about how just the sight of him made her want to run farther, run faster, master her mutinying limbs just a little bit longer.

———

Once in the recently passed past someone well-meaning attempted to unearth historic heartache to make a point. He loves her and she knows it, but not being an authority on her heart, he was out of bounds and she told him so, without hesitation. She wasn’t able to say much else for the duration of the conversation, so overcome was she with a range of emotions and all of them giant-sized, all of them wiggling in their seats while eagerly raising their hands, vying for front-running attention. So she sat still and thankful someone who knows her heart could and would and did speak, not for her but for himself, boldly, but with heartfelt sincerity and patience.

Not wanting to be too hasty in her storytelling, too harried with her heartfelt responses, daily she’s been collecting her words, fishing them from streams, plucking them from early morning sunbeams, finding them tucked behind her ears amidst strands of hair longer than she’s grown in years.

She could tell you she has a past, yes, and it’s both black and bright, as all pasts are. As everything is. But what she really wants to tell you about is her present. Her now full to the brim with smiles and inside jokes, with once-buried speed and dirt under her feet. Her now littered with light and vertical promise, with tie-dye and big sky and endless ridgelines. Her now rushing steadily with memories worth cherishing and keeping, joy seeping in from all sides, threatening often to make her cry. She wants to tell you about a present routinely making her grin, causing her to swim headfirst into currents at once both new and thrilling and yet somehow easy to navigate, perpetually gentle. She knows she hasn’t seen this watercourse before, and yet it feels homegrown, feels winsome, feels perfect amounts of unknown.

———

Daily she finds herself pausing to revel in the frenetic beauty of her life. She would say she feels lucky, but that word never quite fit in her mouth just right. She would say she feels doors and walls and tangles of vines thrown asunder. She would say she feels as if she’s standing atop a high peak with pine boughs for arms and buttercups for eyes, a cool ocean breeze wafting through all of her favorite trees, a litany of trails unraveling their routes below and behind and beside her and all of them calling out to her in welcome and challenging tones, perpetually urging her to brighter and bigger and bolder movements, conversations, transformations.

She would say all of that and think it sounded as much like truth as oversimplification.

Mostly she wants you to know she’s really very happy.

(She really hopes you are, too.)

I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.

I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity of a story. As it turns out, I’m protective of my phrases, perhaps too much so, and so I’m learning when to stand my ground and when to let the ground go tumbling out from underneath me and I’m wondering if catapulting my words into the eyes of impartial third-parties will ever feel even slightly comfortable. Right now it mostly feels like every inch of me splayed open in front of scrutinizing strangers, my voice quiet while my words chatter nervously, naked and vulnerable and waiting to be torn asunder should they ramble or run-on or pause for too long.

————-

Twice a week we saunter to sleep before 9pm, invite our dreams to come early so we can rise and add the sound of our feet flying over ice and snow to dark moonlit hours otherwise devoid of all sound, save for the quiet and yet unmistakable hopeful humming of a day just breaking, all consciousness and worry still soundly sleeping, nothing more alive than the blank slate creeping across butterscotch hills laden with promise as long as the trails we traipse, eyes blown open by exhilarating cold, wind dancing across our eyelids. In these pre-dawn hours there is not light enough for worry; to-do lists aren’t welcome here, can’t compete with the peace of legs turning over and over and over still, arms pumping, hot breath steaming in front of faces softly waking, happily star-gazing. I love these mornings best because at 4am there is only the present tense and it’s stunning and I like to think about him climbing and careening down silhouetted ridge-lines above me, his legs warm and loose now and miles ahead of mine, his momentum pulling me ever forward like a conveyer belt of dirt and rock and sagebrush, like the magnetic mountains pull him to them, up and up and higher still.

————-

Yesterday morning I met a hawk on my way into my favorite coffee shop and he let me stand next to him for multiple minutes and I smiled as I admired his stately stance and his dappled rust-red breast and he looked at me with clear eyes (full hearts, can’t lose) and reminded me I’d dreamed of an eagle the night prior and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about flying.

————-

I’ve been spending the bulk of my days reading and writing and working and running and laughing and being happily highly caffeinated. I collect slivers of sunlight for less bright days, but in this valley of apples I’ve found I never have to wait too long for the light to come rushing back if ever it’s gone. The sun comes to dance here almost daily, giddily cascading, cannonballing, catapulting itself into windows and foothills and upturned faces. Soon enough with prolonged light warmth too will come skipping, clipping winter’s frosty heels, and already I can feel the gentle touch of spring soft and sure and green against my skin. Already I can hear fingers reaching for the edge of a page where another chapter’s ended, and another’s about to begin.

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly sweet scent of roses that shouldn’t still be blooming. Their light pink petals and aroma daily chilled but unmistakably fragrant.

I’m collecting hill-infested streets, cataloging them to keep them close always, to remember the way they push and pull at the breath in my chest, the way they make my legs shake in anticipation of reaching one of their playing-hard-to-get crests.

I’m collecting looks you give me when you think my attention is busy being corralled elsewhere. I pretend I can’t see, climb slowly, stay rock steady. (Don’t worry; your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m collecting trees, so many trees imbibed with intoxicating fall hues. Reds and yellows and oranges so vibrant they make rowdy noises when you catch them in the light just right. They cheer and scream and sing of renewal and growth and death-bringing-life.

I’m collecting hopelessness, so I can set it on fire. Doubt, so I can devour it.

I’m collecting quiet moments, to save for noisy laters. So much change on the horizon, and all of it welcome, sweetly peppered with seeds of mysterious possibility to be watered; I’m going to help it grow.

I’m collecting words, so many stories I want to tell you, when the time is right. When you’re ready. When I am. Soon.

A Marine Biologist and a Professor of English Literature. I tried to be both until a university system said it was too much work, what I wanted too different, made me choose. Beautiful decisions unfolding tenderly like fiddlehead ferns before me, showcasing a forest of promise. But the ferns don’t tell the whole story. That’s not their job. Their job is to mirror resilience. A verdant metaphor of life and longevity and YES.

The whole story is both simple and complicated, as most stories are. As choice is. Exalting one opportunity to a favorite mountaintop so often means another is relegated to the ice-cold trenches of a deep sea, destined to drift quietly in a current swirling with various nouns and half-hearted starts, ideas for zany inventions and thoughts too bold and brazen and untraditionally you to speak, sweet everythings whispered once, when you were sure he wasn’t listening, a promise you nearly shouted with your eyes when she wasn’t in the room.

Sitting in a room packed to the brim with awkwardly brilliant biologists, entomologists, analytical chemists, forestry and genetic specialists, I listen with wide eyes and a broad smile. I hear passion wafting fragrantly underneath every sentence uttered. I watch collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving with endlessly broad applications for a brighter world, and for a brief moment I find myself wondering if I made the wrong decision. I wanted to study whales and ocean currents and the mating habits of starfish as much as I wanted Yeats, Keats, Heaney, and O’Connor. And now anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows why I adore it so. Melville’s seafaring heart is something I inherently understand. He was fascinated by the sea and everything living within it we can’t and won’t ever really see. He wanted to paint the mysterious leviathan, tell its story by simply describing it. A scientist lived in his heart, but the writer was always bigger, bolder, more verbose.

I traded labs and microscopes for books splashed with the souls of kindred spirits, true. I’ve always been drawn to those who can’t be quieted, whose words have to find blank pages daily, even if said pages are never to be read, never to be heralded while they’re still breathing. The heralding matters least, I think. The truth has always been in the trying.

Words are sticky like velcro, will always find their place eventually.

“My son forwarded to me the nice things you wrote about him…Your thoughts made a dad very proud of his son” is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received as a direct result of my writing.

All of that to say: If you’ve written something for someone, about someone, in memory of someone, share it!

With them if you can, or with those who love them. I can guarantee you’re going to make their day when you do. Unless maybe what you wrote about them is a biting diatribe. Maybe keep that to yourself.

——————-

He was the first adult male friend of mine who didn’t talk in circles and called me beautiful and worthy on a regular basis. He was also the first mental health professional who had ever befriended me. He was hilarious and outgoing. Friends with everyone and yet he always seemed to walk alone. I would have spent all day with him, every day. I wasn’t the only one.

He was also the first relationship I ever had with a male friend that would never turn even slightly sexually tense. He was attracted to men, and had been all his life. The son of an evangelical minister, his sexual and personal freedom had been hard-wrought, and hard-won. He still maintained a working familial relationship with most of his family members, though sometimes he spoke of them the way you might speak of a pebble you’ve been forced to carry around in your pocket, something familiar and light enough, but slightly annoying, inescapable.

He was bright, intellectually razor-sharp, and deep-feeling, perpetually and intentionally burdened by the weight of his own decisions, and the weight of those he listened to for a living. I never paid him to sit in front of me, although I could have for the invaluable advice he bestowed upon me almost accidentally whenever we spoke.

To this day he remains the most honest person I have ever met. The type of honest that routinely knocks you into your own subconscious when you’re not paying attention, while you’re sitting there laughing with him, amused and engaged and merely attempting to keep up with his wit and verbal banter.

When I miscarried and was subsequently dumped by a man who the week prior had proposed marriage, he didn’t hesitate to warmly embrace me, and then moments later offered to drive to Montana to vandalize his house. I laughed through hot tears, my face buried in his shoulder, my mascara splashing quietly from my eyelashes to his dress shirt. I knew he meant it. I knew he would have driven the three-and-a-half hours across two mountain passes just to spray paint profane and holy things on the weathered sides of walls that weren’t his. Because within those walls something that belonged to him–something he understood and appreciated and loved–had been soiled. A friendship, and a woman who was once strong and self-assured, now lying in shattered pieces on an embarrassingly dirty floor.

He saw a portrait of who he wanted me to be, and saw the mess of paint I had allowed myself to be reduced to, and he never for a moment judged me on either canvas. I don’t know how he did that, how he managed to be so completely and consistently unbiased. I just know I am forever grateful for his color blindness, for his inability to see me for the wreck I was. He saw me shattered, yes, but he always believed I would rise.

I believed because he did. And for awhile that was enough.

——————-

*Post title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically.

This week’s prompt, from Christine:

Find something blue in your house, and create a fiction piece with that object as a talisman for your main character. The piece should take place at night.

Ready, set, prose! (And I’m slightly cheating, because try as I might, I could not write this piece taking place at night.)
————————-

Mallory pedaled briskly through the treacherous morning sun, the street ahead of her dappled brilliantly with patches of shade cast off the branches of the pines, oaks, and maples towering above the cool black asphalt. She was late, again, but determined to slip into Mr. Wheat’s Math class somehow undetected. Concentrating on her entry strategy, she didn’t see the man rising from a shadow a quarter-mile ahead of her and to her left. But she felt him.

What she felt was warmth on her right wrist where her turquoise watch was fastened loosely, the watch always being slightly too big for Mallory’s wrist, and Mallory never having the chance to tell her father after he bought it for her when he and her mom decided they could be cordial, but they couldn’t share their hearts or a house anymore. “So we’ll always have time,” he had told her after she opened it. She had laughed. “Oh, Dad. It isn’t like I’m never going to see you again.” She often found herself wondering if he had known something she didn’t.

As much as Mallory enjoyed a mental tangent, this definitely wasn’t the time.

Joining the sunburn on her wrist, Mallory now felt a slight prodding behind her knees, as if her legs were physically urging her to pedal faster and so she did, but wait…Was that man actually coming from somewhere underneath the street? No. That was impossible.

Quite impossible that is, until Mallory realized that quite obviously he was indeed rising from the pavement itself, seemingly forming from the shadows themselves, and even as she squinted into the sun to see better she knew she wasn’t hallucinating this sudden shadow man. Keenly aware that what had started as heat on her wrist was now radiating white hot energy up her right arm and into her neck, Mallory was also keenly aware that there wasn’t another person, bike, or car as far as she could see in any direction.

Mallory very quickly decided to trust her first and only instinct and so took the first hard right afforded her and, pedaling as fast as she could, reached a bend in the road right about the time she was sure the shadow man was going to reach out his shadow arm and grab her. Her school was now in sight, as was her principal Mrs. Kruenel, and as Mallory was about to call out to her and very much announce her own lateness, she looked back to see the shadow man seeping back into dark corners of the morning.

Turning back to face the looming brick building and the sanctuary within, Mallory felt a rush of warm wind on her neck that for the briefest of moments reminded her of days spent wandering the Pacific coastline with her father so many years ago.

What is more, I’m going to post a piece of writing based on an ongoing weekly writing challenge issued by Indie Ink as a whole, and the photography-loving curator and creative overlord of said writing challenge, specifically. Every week for as long as the challenge runs, the prompts come from twenty-two other writers who signed up for some compositional fun (sometimes doing business as: creative torture) and we get four to five days to rise to the occasion.

——————————-

My prompt for the week:

French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson once said, “In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.” Google Image Search “Henri Cartier Bresson” and choose the first photo from the left in the second row.  Write a fiction or non-fiction piece *inspired by* or *about* that photo. Your life or the life in the photo, your choice, just write what it inspires.

Because I’m aiming to be challenged and not to cheat, here’s a screen shot showing the first image from the left occupying the second row from when I first searched for Mr. Bresson:

This, then, is my image:

For the proverbial record, I’m writing this from the fictional POV of the little girl in the photo, now grown.

————————Ready, set, prose!—————————-

I don’t remember the last thing my father said to me, but if you ever ask me I will tell you I do.

Making up my father’s last words is a pastime of mine, like twirling my hair around my index finger and thumb, or picking absentmindedly at a face I’m told looks like his. Some of his last words are so vibrant, so bright in color and tone they are almost instantly worthy of eye rolls, destined to be discarded like old chewing gum, pulled from between lips and wrapped around fingers, swallowed whole to be digested never, or secretly stuck to the bottom of bleacher seats. Some of his last words are less poetic. Some of his last words are downright dull.

It was the April before I was to turn eight, and I knew little about death. I knew even less about war. Up until the year before, I had imagined the physical act of dying as something abstract, an affliction of sorts that affected everyone else in the world but spared me, spared my family.

That was before my only grandmother succumbed to cancer, her body torn apart my ravenous cells from nowhere, malicious mutations that no one seemed able to explain.

 No one could paint me a picture of her passing from one world to the next (for I believed in next worlds then), and so I went searching in my own cavernous thoughts for some semblance of justification. I was certain someone, somewhere, could provide me ample cause for stealing a women once so vibrant and beautiful. I found no such illuminating exposition. No comforting explanation for death arriving mere weeks after danger was first noted in her limbs.

What I did find was apathy, a profound and noticeable universal disregard for my family’s new-found grief. Bustling traffic continued to perpetually annoy my mother. The bakery two blocks from our house still filled my room with the smell of fresh bread. My little brother still followed me around while I discovered new and inappropriate places to hide from him. I still had to go to school to practice multiplication tables I could do in my sleep and read imaginary stories written by people who would never know my father, my grandmother, me. Fanciful stories I pretended not to love, written by people who were no longer breathing. Just like my grandmother. Just like my father. Not like me.

If I missed them so badly, if I wanted to see them again, why couldn’t I just stop breathing, too? I wondered this to myself quite often back then, and aloud once or twice before my mother shushed me and told me to concentrate on actually washing the dishes instead of merely suffocating them in a vat of soapy water.

Life seemed indifferent to my grandmother no longer being a part of the personal and planetary rotation, and after an obnoxiously elaborate ceremony with medals and a big flag mom never wanted to touch again after tall men in taller uniforms first handed it to her while we both stood in an over-crowded cemetery, my little brother staring longingly at the fresh dirt he wasn’t allowed to sit in or fling or pat into a pie, life seemed wholly indifferent to my father’s death, too.

After an hour-long ceremony wherein I pretended I had magic powers which enabled me to make time stand still, the world stopped taking notice of my father being shot in a country I couldn’t locate on a map without assistance, for people I would never meet, for people who would never remember the way his mustache tickled my cheek when he bent to hug me, or the way his eyes danced when he was talking about motorcycles he and my brother loved and my mother hated, or the way his laugh always made my mother laugh too, even if she was preoccupied with being upset with him.

After a few months I too found myself forgetting to remember they had died. I still anticipated trips to my grandmother’s house to help her bake her pies and do her crossword puzzles and grow her roses. I still waited for my father to come home after work, telling my mother jokes while I set the table and he pretended to help with dinner, carrying my brother on his shoulders while he giggled breathlessly.

Death stole two of the most important people in my life before I had time to memorize them, and so became a mysterious enemy to me, as elusive as the genesis of those malicious mutations emerging so suddenly violent and vengeful, seeing fit to devour the quality of my grandmother’s life. As cruel and senseless as the bullets that careened into my father’s athletic torso.

I took everything so personally then.

Since September I’ve been running often. During lunches and after work, and anytime I can. I’m down two sizes, feeling stronger, and happy, and there is still a lot more work left to do, but running feels amazing again for the first time in a long time, and I need to take a moment to celebrate my return to it.

I started writing this after a particularly mind-altering run in Forest Park on September 27, 2010, to remind myself why I run on the days I feel tired, or discouraged, or otherwise might not remember. Upon revisiting this post prior to publishing it I was reminded of how I can rarely view or ponder or walk into any woods without simultaneously thinking of these four lines from Frost, from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:

The woods are lovely dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

——————–

I was sitting at work just like every other day. Sitting, sitting, so much sitting still.

On this day I could physically feel the way my body ached to move. The way it needed to sprint, to physically exert itself until every ounce of energy was spent. To erase the anxiety, and the fear, and the doubt, and the tiny stresses of the day compounded into heaps of worry etched across furrowed brows. The way my legs needed to stretch, to reach out for soft dirt and moss and tread quickly, steadily, moving with the rest of me, one unit in forward motion, with a combined goal: To move forward, ever forward.

This time, I listened. I knew what my body needed, what it wanted, and I listened. Simple really. And yet the simplest of occasions are so easily complicated.

I concentrated on my breathing and heard the soft sound of my feet padding cautiously against the soft dirt. Later: The more solid sound of my feet finding traction and moving quicker when bends in the trail were harder. Ferns everywhere, and I could smell recent rain still resting on them, and my heart traveled back to weekends spent hiking with my sister and my dad, the three of us seeking solace underneath a seemingly endless platoon of pine trees, tall and stoic. Happily heavily breathing, I sought to memorize leaves on low-hanging branches perfectly obscuring a bustling city only a few miles below where I catapulted myself down, down, downhill and around a bend in between two solid trunks–trees older than I can ever hope to be–around a small creek barely trickling with water, and up, up, uphill to another bend in the trail where I could again look out onto a trove of trees peppered with bright gold and green hues, a forested blanket hiding everything but this moment, this exact place.

I had to force myself to make it to the trail. I had to fight to hold on to the feeling that my body NEEDED this time, needed this space to stretch and groan and grow. It’s so easy to drive home and sit. To get complacent. To make excuses, however valid. “I’m too tired, too sore, too busy; it’s too dark, too cold, too hot.”

I know them all by heart. I heard every single one of them in my head the moment I decided to run that day.

Too busy listening to my legs telling me they needed to run until they couldn’t carry my weight anymore, I ignored every negative thought seeking to derail my new-found motivation, and the sheer exhilaration I felt when my feet starting propelling me down that trail–as my entire body instantly remembered how to work seamlessly in unison–was one of the most euphoric sensations I’ve ever felt. I was almost laughing as I sprinted as fast as I could, years of muscle memory from countless basketball and track practices once again pulsing through my arms and legs, reminding me my body knows how to do this. It’s always known how to do this.

The simplest of occasions are so easily complicated, when all my body wants to do is something perfectly simple. Something perfectly part of its original design. It wants to move.

——————–

*Post title inspired by Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If you haven’t read it, and you run, or bike, or want to do either, I highly recommend it.

You see, I’ve been a lover of the ocean, and of all things aquatic and nautical-inspired, ever since I can remember.

My love for sea-faring-everything might very well have been fostered during the myriad spring breaks spent exploring quaint coastal communities in and around Port Ludlow, Washington. Some of my fondest childhood memories spring forth from days spent poking my curious face into every trinket shop in downtown Poulsbo and downtown Bremerton, carefully selecting bracelets laden with sparkling gems found in nearby sand, wondering about the sharks who gave up their teeth for necklaces while peering at tiny sailing ships in tiny bottles  and cheerfully collecting polished shells to keep in my pockets.

I still vividly remember late afternoons spent beach-combing for mollusks and buried treasure on Bainbridge and Whidbey Islands; a morning studying tides with my aunt Joy until she happily selected the perfect window for clamming in Port Angeles; the way saltwater smelled on my skin hours later, still stuck between my toes.

Until I reached my second year of college and realized a simultaneous double major in Biology and English Literature was going to be next to impossible without first learning how to clone myself, I very much wanted to be a Marine Biologist. As such, I had spent many a day-dream envisioning a life led on the ocean floor: mining murky water for mystic and illicit meaning; diving for clues to uncloak the mysteries of marine mammals; marveling daily at the miraculous design of oceanic ecosystems.

Though I know it to be much more than a fairytale career, I still find the possibilities, and the idea of a seascape workplace, endlessly fascinating, crashing waves to me as tempting as a siren song.

It’s little surprise then, that when I was properly introduced in college to one Mr. Herman Melville–author and sailor and self-taught know-it-all concerning all things leviathan and nautical–I fell into deep literary smit. I was fortunate enough to study under a bona fide Melvillean scholar at my university, and was able to take an entire course focusing solely on Melville and his collected works. Soon after, I read Moby-Dick multiple times, followed by every piece of his writing I could get my hands on, including his short stories (which are some of my favorites), and his collected poems.

I was surprised and thrilled to receive an email from a fellow Melville fan while I was in Korea (Hi! Scott), with references to Moby-Dick related awesomeness, my very favorite of which was a project entitled One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick, and the fact that the artist (is super creative and talented, yes! and) knew to hyphenate the title, Moby-Dick (though you never hyphenate the whale, Moby Dick) made me want to give him a literary fist bump. Is there such a thing as a literary fist bump? There should be.

I’m verily smitten with the entire project (which is at this point, still ongoing), especially page 153.  For those of you lazy selective link clickers, this! is page 153 (image © Matt Kish):

The line from the text he took for this page’s inspiration, which also doubles as the piece’s title: “Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints — the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.”

—————

In other quasi-nautical news, last Thursday I attended a (n uber-talented) friend’s art opening, her photography part of a three-point collaboration with two local Portland artists (Hey Jolby!) to ultimately create fifty works of original art, all sea-faring and pirate-esque in nature.

If faced with choosing one official favorite or walking the plank, I think I would have to go with “Treasure of Calypso”:

I was also quite taken with “The Death Coast”:

And “The End”:

(All images © Ashely Forrette & Jolby)

The exhibit is called Sea Legs (and is showing at the Together Gallery until March 20th), and I loved the show enough to seriously plot how I could somehow move into the exhibit space, so I didn’t have to walk out of it without every single piece tucked underneath my arm.

——————

Thus, we come to the end of this, our maritime digression of sorts.

Happy! March, ye land lubbers.

Post title is referencing a lyric (“I’m on a boat and/It’s going fast and/I’ve got a nautical-themed pashmina afghan”) from The Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat,” which, yes, I’ve probably watched six-hundred times, and yes, still makes me laugh, every time.

Oh! And I have a post up at Work It Mom! today, talking about how to deal with difficult bosses and colleagues, and my Print Of The Week is up on Style Lush, too!

I like metaphors, analogies, allegories, so I choose the ladder simply because it’s headed toward the sky and that, to me, feels hopeful. I’m in no mood to go down. I have no idea where that dusty spiral staircase leads, but I’ve been there before; I’ve been down. I’m tired of “down” in all its various incarnations.

I reach my right hand out to grab the right side of the ladder that appears, from all physical inspections, to be incapable of holding my frame as I attempt to climb it into the sky, up, up, up to where I believe something, or someone, is waiting for me. I lift my left leg onto the first rung, and slowly, steadily, begin to climb.

The ladder creaks under my weight but holds firm, strong, and does not waiver as I refuse to waiver, still concentrating on taking one step at a time, pulling myself up, up, up, until I reach the last rung of the ladder. I hoist myself forward a few final inches, to stand straight, both of my feet planted firmly on the last rung, my hands lightly resting on the splintered tops of the ladder as I crane my head to the right and the left, silently canvassing my new landscape.

In front of me I see a slender red canoe with two wooden oars, one painted green and one painted orange, lapping lazily in a sliver of blue water shimmering gently underneath a crescent moonlight. To the right rests a ruddy-colored path through woods both dark and deep; I can see a faint light from somewhere in the forest, and smell the strong scent of lilacs nearby. I can’t entirely tell what’s to my left, but it appears to be a hill laden with wildflowers of various shapes and lengths, and the drop beyond the apex of slope appears steep, though I think I can just make out a narrow gravel trail leading down the hill into the world beyond.

A few minutes to rest and I know it’s time for me to make another decision. I pause briefly before purposefully striding forward, feeling assured even in my uncertainty.

Now, it’s your turn.

Do you take your chances in the multi-colored canoe, rowing yourself along the shore, or into open water, or simply letting the waves carry you where they will?

Do you hike along the gravel trail that looks dark and uncertain, murky with hope?

Perhaps you choose to walk the wooded path, the one smelling of lilacs and challenges meant to stretch your arms and your toes, and take you to far-away places you were always too busy to dream into existence?

Or, do you climb the nearest tree and see how far you can see, maybe for miles, mentally mapping the surely uncertain terrain before you trod your tired feet in any direction?

You see, none of these is the wrong, or right, answer. Not in this type of story, anyway.

The answer, I think, is to move forward, perpetually. The answer, I think, is to refuse to allow the terrain to shift underneath your feet before you set out on your way, before you begin consciously trekking toward the unrealized adventures you can see swirling, dancing in tufts of fog miles and still miles ahead of where you currently stand, eyes staring down at muddy boots, willing yourself to take that first step.

So, go ahead, choose you own adventure.

I’ll be over here, choosing mine.