Goddess Elliott and I watch a lot of sunsets on Shirley's sad little holy dock. Just down the street from A.J.'s the dock sits in the middle of the marsh and has a terrific view of the Back River. Unlike the crowds that flock to A.J.'s for dinner, drinks and watching the sun sink into the ocean, it's normally just Goddess and me sitting on the sad little holy dock. If the tide is low the choirs of mussels sing to us with their ticks and pops. If it's high the green marsh grass is covered and it looks as though God has painted it a greenish blue. Either way it is beautiful.
One of the things about the past year is I really slowed to down so that I could heal. I was tired, broken, hurt and full of a weary sadness that had become all consuming. So I dropped out of most everything and placed myself in this intensive care setting of beloved back decks, Fran's thousand shades of green, and a little holy dock. I cried enough to raise the tides a few feet higher.
I didn't do an especially good job taking care of myself during these days. I really didn't care. So I drank too much and stopped going out. I counted my losses and didn't celebrate much anything. It was a dark time and it seemed as though the sun never shined at all.
Good friends worried about me and went out of their way to make certain I was making it through in spite of it all. This tight little circle wrapped itself around me and slowly their love made its way into my heart and the healing began.
Then because I had time I started taking longer and more thoughtful walks. Shirley's sad little holy dock became a temple of prayer. My back yard became this ongoing work of art. My bicycle became the preferred mode of transportation. For the first time, I could simply explore me.
I'm a much bigger fan of sunrises than I am sunsets. Sunsets are all about the end of the day. It's over. Darkness comes. I know a lot of people who run from the darkness into bars, clubs or other people's arms as a delusional way of fighting off the gloom of their lives. I joined them too many times last year.
Sunrises are all about ... starting again. No matter how much we screwed up yesterday, the sun gives us a new day. "God's greatest gift," says Eli Wiesel, "is the chance to start over." This is from a survivor of Auschwitz ... the concentration camp in Poland. I went there once on a cold snowy February day and the place still reeks of death. Piles of discarded clothes rot outside of the crematoria that burned the bodies. In the midst of that dark experience, I found a candle that the wind had not blown out beside an unlit one. I reached down and lit the candle and a holiness descended that was shockingly unexpected.
Over the last year, something similar occurred.
Months of sunsets were suddenly balanced by sunrises.
I learned to enjoy the sunsets as they are things of beauty but they are delusional ... they make you believe that things have ended. Your day is done. And too many people sink with the sun into a watery grave where there is no light. This is where I was a long time.
Then ... the sun rose the next day. And the next ... and the next ... and I eventually believed that it will keep rising shining light in the darkest of places ... into my heart ... my soul ... eventually all of me.
Sinking suns are full of heaviness and weight. Sunrises are light and easy. Sunsets are endings. Sunrises ... beginnings.
Today with the rising sun, I am beginning again. Light, airy, full of hope and promise.
