The ocean is a brownish gray and the heavens are covered with a blanket of purple gray clouds. The sand is a dirty white, moisture hangs in the air so as I run it sticks to me making me wet, and the radio pumps “Have yourself a merry little Christmas” in my ears. I use a verb and a pronoun. The pronoun is “me.”
A mountain of sea foam separates the sea from the shore and as I run the wind blows large pieces of it away and it flies past me, tumbling in the sand until it grows smaller and smaller before disappearing.
I am struck with the thought that the sea foam represents my past. It was a lot of big stuff back then but as time passes it diminishes in importance and scope. One day it will be lost from the collective consciousness and simply be gone.
Just like me.
Though I’m not yet! While I have been lying low, gathering my thoughts as a pseudo-sage put it to me I’ve been working harder than I ever have to understand…me.
It is damn hard work; the hardest that I’ve ever done but I believe that diving into the quiet will lead me to a new place. Gandalf the grey will become Gandalf the white and while there may be some dark stuff to work through it’ll all work out fine in the end.
In the middle of a run on a deserted beach with pieces of sea foam past flying by me, I stop. And pee. “It is great being a boy,” I say to God. She makes the moisture in the air turn to rain. God can be funny.
Resuming the run, watching the sea foam blow, tumble and disappear, each seems to represent things that I’ve been working through over the past several months.
“You’re burning out,” my mother told me a year ago or so. I protested because I’ve got a social work degree and she doesn’t. She proved right. Desperately needing time for myself and family after years of focusing on everyone else, I reached the point where I knew. Then I made a gross mistake. I listened to what other wiser, successful and proven mostly old white men counseled. I didn’t listen to myself and walk away.
So the thing about a fire is once it begins it will continue consuming until there is nothing else to burn. So when the burning took everything inside of me it continued to consume the things around me. After my inside had become dying embers it t burned away a deep love that I cherished, long standing friends, then a thirty-one year career.
For months I sat and cried in the smoldering ashes of it all.
The friends of Job came by to counsel me, but there was no consolation. I wiped the ashes across myself just as Job did and sent them away just like he did.
But a precious few kept coming back.
They refused to listen to me. They rejected waiting until I was at a better place to talk. They let me know there is no hurry to move on and told me to take my time. They would wait. They got a mixture of sea water and tears and wiped the ashes away that I’d covered myself with.
And out of a charred life, a dead friend and long forgotten ones came back; one literally, others from college and one from a God forsaken place where it snows as much as it doesn’t so that you have to mail order everything to your house because there is no going out. My extended family on this island proved to be as significant and important as those who share my DNA. My Mom showed back as a daily presence when it had been decades since that had last taken place.
I ponder these things now dry in my kitchen, staring at Fran’s thousand shades of green, with Goddess lying at my feet munching on a bone that is bigger than she. It is from my friend Nanci at the Breakfast Club who … well, I don’t know how she got them but she did.
A smile creeps across my face. After years of every day and night Christmas activity, this year I’ve had none. Today I was invited to the only Christmas party that I’ll attend this year and it is with the people whom I love most.
Goddess and I are throwing a smaller one for the people who will not be at that one. Then people are waiting on me in St. Martin.
Then when I come back, I know who will be waiting on me.
And who won’t.
