Cheers everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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Notes from Below Sea Level
“This Bewildering Immensity”
For me, as mid-teen, sleep was its own opiate. Waking was a slow, lumbering process that involved minutes of disorientation and muted fumbling until I could find yesterday’s pants hanging over my desk chair and the promise of coffee lured me toward the kitchen. Winter mornings were exacerbated by the pervasive wet chill in the house and the lack of light from longer nights. The only exceptions I recall were preceded by evenings when my father quietly asked if I wanted to go out in the boat with him in the morning. Even an early frost and the promise of teenaged-fueled dreams couldn’t keep me in bed—the thought of launching by moonlight, an arctic blast numbing my hands and face, pulled me awake against my will. Those were hours navigated by dead reckoning.
Despite the diminishing light that comes with winter, there is more to see. Further north plants die back, trees shed leaves, and the horizon opens and expands as the solstice approaches, closing slowly as spring creeps in. During these colder months on the Gulf Coast, the verdant greens are muted, the swamp grasses are lightly gilded with shades of golden 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 and the natural mist is wrung out—the midnight blacks appear deeper, the daily blues richer. The land lacks in artifice and lays naked; there are fewer places to hide.
In Pat Conroy’s novel Beach Music, his protagonist, Jack McCall, returns to his native South Carolina from Rome, Italy (where he fled with his daughter following his wife’s suicide) to help with his ailing mother. There are—in true Conroy fashion—several stories intertwined, including a coming-to-terms-with-one’s-life thread when Jack is forced to face his past. At one point, pontificating about everything from the Vietnam War, his wife’s betrayal, and his own personal catharsis, he observes: “I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.” There is something telling about his ending up on the water’s edge. Not only is water a large part of most of Conroy’s novels, it is a central theme and an unyielding force in the lives of many of his characters. Having grown up on the water, I have a certain affinity for his use of water to underline and highlight our internal struggles.
You don’t even need to live near water to understand its draw, its raw power. Here in coastal Louisiana, we watch it rise and fall, we stand witness as it covers the banks and battures and diurnally recedes to reveal the muddy edges and 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.
I sometimes come to listen to the 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. Music directly imitates the passions of the soul, Aristotle once observed, 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 passion. 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 water 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 February dawn, coffee at hand, a cigarette at my side not yet lighted, and several strays (watchful) just far enough away to afford time for considered judgment. All in all, here on my tiny patio, such decisions are simpler than most. The promise of food and a modicum of patience inevitably win out: a mutual detente is achieved and we relax into familiarity. So too, the tide inevitably wins out. Endless daily judgments flow, work and life call, and love abides. Last night I promised my love I wouldn’t write about her (she laughed); but my recollection of those waters of my childhood tests my strongest bonds and most heartfelt promises.
I realized years ago that the tide’s music is the original sirens' song. I smile, reaching for that cigarette—a nasty habit developed over years of anxiety and intentional foolishness. My father—the person who taught me most about those waters—neither smoked nor drank and seemed (it felt then) more at home on the open waters than in the confines of our small home in town. But my very existence on the water’s edge makes me think more of its bewildering immensity than the familiar comfort that cloaked my father when he pushed from the dock and maneuvered the bow toward open waters.
Winter is bowing out here, though; and the winds this morning are tinged with a promise of earlier light and warmer days. The red fish have begun their migration back to deeper waters and water marks grow higher on the hope of spring. Having navigated the shallows of Barataria Bay, my father would hand the wheelhouse to me with a trusting gaze, the memory of which still brings cold tears to my eyes.
As with any significant ending—a season, a life—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 lover’s hand or the sound of a son’s laugh. Last night I again was reminded that our lives are complicated and varied. They are, in part, defined by an unknown 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.
(February, 2018-2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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What's on your mind this morning?