I drove the New Hampshire seacoast route in my friend and COVID podmate's car last week. We had gone to Portsmouth for the afternoon and decided to take the long way back.
The sun had already set, but we had a bit of light to see by. Enough that we indulged our decidedly Romantic natures (Byron would be proud) and stopped to take in the eastward facing ocean before us. Though the wind was biting and the waves moody, it was a peaceful respite from the fears and dailiness of life.
It is nearing a year since the pandemic came to my doorstep and forced my hand. I had thought I would stay. I had thought I would be strong and choose the life I wanted to live, choose to be the person I wanted so badly to be. I thought that life I wanted (that person I wanted to be) was the one there, in Morocco.
It turns out it wasn't.
When the world's health crisis struck me, I chose to leave my new home and return to my family. When a private health crisis struck my family's home, I chose to stay, forsaking my chosen life. I reluctantly and fearfully began to put down roots.
I thought I knew what would happen next. I would shrivel up and live out my life in deprivation and sorrow for the longest time, and then something else would happen to shake up my world and give me a second chance to live my life.
It turns out I could not have been more wrong.
The soil was rich, and dark, and smelled of goodness. It nourished these roots of mine, the roots I put down so resentfully at first in those early days. I expected to find hard rocks and dry, sandy soil in this year of waste and grief; I have found instead good humus and detritus that have brought back joy to my life. I have rekindled old friendships and started new ones. I have poured my love into my nephews' lives and been repaid far, far beyond the sum of my frail efforts. I have sunk myself into hobbies and learning. I have unlearned hurtful habits, and built healthy new ones. I have cooked, and cleaned, and worked, and walked, and above all in this year of blasted hopes and sprawling despair, I have begun to learn how to selflessly love others in my life. (Begun being the operative word.)
This year is not one I would ever want to live over again. But neither would I ever want to lose who I am becoming as a result of it.
My friend and I stayed to watch the last bits of sunlight give way to the softness of night. The ocean's waves continued their ministrations to our souls, and Coleridge (the Romantic poet) would have approved of the gentleness with which we tread on the rocks and snow beneath our feet.
"Mysteries, Yes"
by Mary Oliver
(2009)
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
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