UNTIL THE DEEP WATER STILLS

DEEP WATER STILL

 

 

Nicholas, I wish you could experience this moment. I’ve never seen the water this breathlessly still. I almost believe I could step off this dock and walk on the surface of it right out to Bass Rock.

  

It’s so quiet I think you could hear a blade of grass tremble if you listened deeply enough. The utter silence that you come to when you triumph over fear and anger. The silence that is left when all else is distilled down to the crystal of love. 

 

 

I still have more regrets than I can count. But regrets aren’t so terrible after all. They’re just reminders of what we’ve learned and how hard we tried not to know. I see that now – how much energy I put into escaping the truth.

 

I was swept up in a wave that was partly of my own making. We create our own realities, I think. Or at least we paint our own colours on the broad strokes one we’re given to work with. We have choices. We influence the ebb and flow of life. The tide will always be but we decide which shore it washes upon.

 

 

We spend so much time chasing love trying to capture it like a butterfly in a net. All the while convinced that once we have it the riddle of life will be solved. The paradox is that love is the riddle. It keeps changing its shape and texture. Every time we think we’ve wrestled it into the shape we want, it dances away again.

 

That must be why we’re so fascinated with it. It’s always more than we think it is. Richer, wider and deeper. We keep trying to get to the bottom of it but we never do. So often we get so caught up in trying to bend it into the shape we want that we lose our grip on it.

 

We say that we’re “falling in love” or “falling out of love” as if it’s a state of mind but it’s not. It’s a state of grace that we’re permitted to share but not to own. And so it is that only when we learn to accept love, in the full knowledge that it can be lost, do we come into the full possession of love.

 

Nicholas, I don’t know what to make of you. You are the sound of wings. You are the moon rising. You are deep water still. If you are willing, I will walk upon you and see where the moon tide leads.