After 23 hours of flying my husband arrived from South Sudan and then just hours later we all packed into the car to drive up the Pacific Rim Highway, to where the sea crashes into the shore on wild waves.
Our island is gentle, soft. Our shore is silent and meditative, calming.
The open north Pacific, out there on the edge of nothing, where land falls away into forever, the shore is brooding and powerful, and makes one feel so very small.
What is it about that wild coast, where land falls away into sea that moves into forever? You can feel the curve of the earth while leaning into that horizon.
We ferried and drove from our little island all the way to that wild sea, the Pacific in all it’s fullness. Farms in green valleys gave way to mountain roads still edged with snow that gave way to a long flat edge. There at the endless sea waves crashed against rocks, with a wind so strong you couldn’t hear your own thoughts. The beaches had no end.
I thought of this amazing explorer I was just reading about, Henry Worsley. His need to push his boundaries, man’s boundaries, ultimately cost him his life. Standing there at the curve of the earth I thought of him and how some are pushed to go deeper than the rest of us. I thought of all the ones who set sail on that wild sea to discover and conquer, without even knowing if they would find land again or forever be adrift. The ones who kept their eyes skyward.
How often do we not look up? As a child I never lost sight of this magnificent crazy earth. On hot summer nights I would lie in grass counting stars, making wishes on falling ones and everything seemed so tiny compared to it. The wonder of it all was my ship, my point of departure into becoming who I would be.
Life gets busy. Kids don’t sleep. Dreams change. We have good days and bad. Good years and harder ones. But the stars are still hanging above us and some of them are falling, catching children’s dreams as they go.
We are on a planet, spinning in space.
Sometimes being on this inland has felt a bit like sitting on a butterfly’s wing. It’s so beautiful and gentle. Translucent and magical. We are protected from the open ocean, cocooned and nestled between islands.
It was so nice to go past these boundaries, to reach up and over and to stand at that curvature of the earth and look up out of that butterfly’s wing to the chaos of this crazy and truly wild universe.
Wow.