Notes from Below Sea Level
As the Moon Waxes Gibbous
The moon is waxing gibbous and setting before 5:00 this morning, coming full in a couple days but curtaining early enough to remind me of the look and feel of distilled winter darkness. Surprisingly this has been a calmer holiday season than those of the recent past (for me, at least). I am almost done with gift shopping (it’s not like that is some huge task, honestly), work is less frenetic than is usual this time of year, and my focus has been on family and close friends. My younger sister who entered hospice last week passed away on the anniversary of our mother’s death. No matter the rational position I take (having known this was coming and having said my “goodbyes,” and my “I love yous,”), the emotional toll must be paid. Family members and life-long friends are quietly working to converge here in a week to memorialize a loving, quiet university librarian, mother, sister, wife, colleague, and friend.
Don’t think me callus to say, but death itself is somehow easier to understand and accept in the heart of winter. The diminished, angled light that comes with winter may open sightlines, but it also flattens nature’s affect. Further north, trees shed leaves and the horizon opens and expands as the solstice approaches. Here, though, the verdant greens are muted, the swamp grasses are lightly gilded with shades of gold patina, and the waters recede: even high tides rarely reach summer’s low mark. The night skies are clearer as the colder air holds less moisture—the midnight blacks appear deeper, the daily blues richer. The land lacks in artifice and lays naked before us; we have fewer natural places to hide.
You don’t need to live on the edge of a vast body of water to understand its draw, its raw power. Here in South Louisiana, we watch it rise and fall, we stand witness as it covers the banks and battures and diurnally recedes to reveal the marshy wasteland littered with the detritus of both nature’s and man’s wants. Not a bad way to pass a bit of contemplative time, really—listening to water slip its berth and set out for distant shores, what Pat Conroy calls that “bewildering immensity.” I sometimes go to listen to this water slouching back into the deep, its symphonic notes resonating in the lower scale. My own personal musica universalis. My own small ritual of atonement and renewal. Aristotle once observed that music directly imitates the passions of the soul, but I’m not so sure I agree with that as an all-encompassing observation. For me music can nourish my spiritual dimension as much as reflect the passionate. And while I’m thinking about dead Greeks no one reads anymore, Socrates said that music can impart to one a graceful soul—which is closer, I think, to what I somehow feel when I’m on the water’s edge.
Run your fingers through this murky liquid and watch the ripples fan out, swirl, and collide and you’ll get a sense of my mood this morning. I’m enveloped in the chill of a lovely December dawn, coffee at hand, a cigarette at my side not yet lighted, and several strays (watchful) just far enough away to afford time for a considered judgment. All in all, here on my tiny patio, such judgments are simpler than most. Food and patience inevitably win out: a mutual detente is achieved and we relax into familiarity. And the tide wins out, as it inevitably does. Endless daily judgments flow, work and life call, and love—somehow—abides.
This time of year, we move into the heart of the holiday season and, if history is any indication, it will be a difficult time for many people. Perhaps even more-so this year than most. There are pressures of the financial and familial type, an expectation of cheer and goodwill at every turn, and a real sense that the year is ending. As with any significant ending, we tend to engage in retrospective thinking, often finding our situations wanting. But this morning, I’m heartened by that music and the knowledge that comfort can be shared through the touch of a loved-one’s hand or an errant memory of a better time. This week I was reminded that our lives are complicated and varied. That they are, in part, defined by an unknowing and uncertain future we control about as much as we control the tides. The best we can do is listen closely, work toward a graceful soul, and trust that the decisions we make are in tune with who we are in that moment on the water’s edge.
(For Em—December 2024)
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Cheers everyone and here’s to having a day worth remembering.
Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?
