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This is a much different story than the ones you normally find here.  This story I’ve written for my mother; placed it here at her request.  It’s the story of her father, a man none of us truly knew aside from what he allowed us to see and the oral history others passed along.

Echoes of Europe: The story of a diamond

The diamond, a brilliant single multi-faceted carat, is fabulously perfect.  She’s been assured she’d not find one so flawless now.  It was born in another age when quality was valued over quantity, when demure was still considered tasteful.  She had it assessed nearly thirty years ago, and even then it was worth more than her very nice car.  The gemologist looked stunned that she’d let him take it off her finger, had her accompany him to his work bench so that no one could later accuse him of switching the stone.

She wears it, unafraid that it will bring her harm though some question that as reckless.  She waves those cautionary voices aside; the ring’s not brash enough to draw attention to itself.  Also, jewelry is meant to be worn.  What’s its point if you lock it away in shadow.  Some gems even lose their fire if hidden.  She knows diamonds do not.  Still, she wears it all the same.

The ring has a story, one she’s known for years, one that was handed to her with the platinum circlet itself, and it’s a tale she loves to tell for its passion, its history, its heartache.  She’ll share it with you if you ask.

Early 1940s, Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a wealthy manufacturing family gone gently into decline.  In this culture it’s the pedigree that counts.  He’s fallen in love and wants to marry a girl from his own social set.  She’s pretty enough, not quite a beauty, you know how these WASPy Southern families are.  They marry amongst themselves, and the genes don’t always translate well.  She might have done Cotillion, probably a true deb, undoubtedly DAR and UDC, Junior League and Garden Club, too.

Dancing at the Cavalier on Atlantic Avenue, moonlit walks along the beach.  Those were golden days for a young couple in love.  He bought her a ring, slipped it on her left hand, a perfect single-carat diamond.  She had visions of their home in Ghent with curtains in the windows and their children running up and down the hardwood stairs.

Then Hitler happened, and he joined the army.  He didn’t wait to be drafted; it just wasn’t done.  He shipped out with Patton’s Third.  He landed at Normandy, not at Omaha –  further up the coast at Utah Beach, and he was at war for a very long time, saw truly horrific things that change a man forever.  The boy who left was lost to the girl except when his letters arrived.  She probably tucked each one away, under her pillow until the next one whistled through the brass mail slot in her parents’ door.  Undoubtedly, she lived at home.

She wrote letters, too.  He clung to them, used them as his way to see Heaven while walking through the Nazis’ Inferno.  In his mind, he held the visions of the home she would create in Ghent.  He savored them, went to sleep with those pictures in his head along with pictures of her and the knowledge that she would be waiting when he sailed home.

May, 1945, VE Day comes and goes.  He will now go home and marry his girl.  After all the hell he’s seen, despite all the blood guilt he now carries, her face, her precious face, will offer salvation.  But the American GIs are kept in Europe for months to help clean up the mess.  Weeks – months – go by, but finally, finally, he’s at her door.  He stands, changed irrevocably, but offering her all he is and has, and sure she will offer the anointing for a new life, a new soul.  He holds out his war-defiled hands waiting for her benediction, but when he leaves her, it’s his ring he holds.

He arrives home and says nothing to the parents and sister who await, anxious to see their son and brother shed the mantle of death he’s been wearing.  Instead, he treads heavily to the basement where he opens the roaring coal furnace.  He can’t look at the ring again, can’t face down the devastation of his dreams.  He hurls the ring into the fire along with the hope he’s carried, then slams the furnace door.  He marches up to his bedroom, and presses the door closed, leans against the wood.  Without her absolution, it’s impossible now to block out the battlefields of Europe; the dead will forever stay with him.

His parents glance at each other.  The phone rings, and his mother answers.  It’s the girl.  In a rush, her story comes out.  His mother, ever a practical woman, quickly concludes what her son must’ve burned, and tells his father to let the furnace’s fire die.  She instructs her husband to retrieve the diamond from the ashes when the embers have cooled in the morning.

The next day, the young man reconsiders his rash decision to destroy the ring.  He knows by now the setting will have melted, but the stone – that very expensive stone – carbon hardened by elements and time – will remain untouched.  He goes to the furnace and stirs through the ashes.  That act, coating his hands with gray soot, chunks of blackened matter, leave him gasping for air, tears streaming down his face his mind trapped in a moment in time standing before Buchenwald’s blackened, gaping ovens.  He finds nothing; his father beat him to it.

1970s, Norfolk, Virginia.  The old lady sits with her middle-aged son.  She plays with a ring on her right hand.  It’s an intricate, Edwardian platinum setting with a perfect diamond in the center, flanked by two trilliant diamonds.   The son notices the ring again, feels sure it had a different center stone at one time, perhaps a ruby.  She’s worn it for years; he’s admired it for years, but he doesn’t know where it she acquired it.  He assumes his father gave it to her.  Every time he’s asked, she gets a twinkle in her eye and evades the question.

Today, she’s rather talkative.  Maybe she’ll talk about the ring.  He asks.  She glances at her hand, then up at him, assesses him in that searching way that only a mother can.  She nods to herself.  She’s come to a decision.

She tells him a story about a night right after he’d come home from Hitler’s war.  He remembers that soul-crushing night well.  Kay had sent him packing.  He’d not expected it, not at all.  She’d written him letters throughout the war, even until the time he’d arrived home.  She’d signed them all “Love,” and he’d believed in it.  He’d thought they were getting married.  That image of her in his head had carried him through the savaged corpse of Europe.  The curtains in Ghent were to have been his sacrament of Reconciliation, his absolution.  But she’d found someone else.  She’d not wanted to send him a “Dear John” letter.  There was no feeling for him in her seemingly selfless act; it was just patriotism.  Just as girls had given up wearing silk stockings, they didn’t send “Dear Johns.”  So, she’d continued the ruse, and he’d felt like a fool – her fool.

He’d thrown her ring into the furnace, let it burn, not wanting a reminder of her, of the hope he’d handed her that she’d thrown back into his face.  Early the next morning, he’d panicked over the amount of money he’d literally caused to go up in smoke.  He’d combed through the debris – that awful debris – on the furnace floor, but had been unable to find the stone, thought that perfect stone lost forever.  As his mother speaks, he feels himself grow angry, betrayed again.

His mother winds up her tale.  So, the diamond was never lost.  His ears are almost disbelieving.  She’d stolen it from beneath his sleeping head.  His own mother had stolen his diamond.  She’d taken his beautiful, expensive diamond and placed it, concealed it really, in a setting she’d long had, and only spoken of it once in whispers to his sister who had kept the secret, too.  His mother had worn it – flaunted it –  daily for years.

Now, she sits across from him and smiles beatifically.  She’s waiting for his absolution.  So much time has passed, she expects it.  She has no sense of the ghosts who have accompanied him since 1942, no idea those ghosts wouldn’t leave because that diamond wasn’t worn by the woman who refused him sanctification.  He feels himself growing warm, his collar growing tight.  He wants to rage at her, roar the fire that’s burning him alive but cannot.  He never could, not where his mother is concerned.  Instead, he’ll go home and rail at the woman he did marry, “Not-Kay,” and the children he had with her.

His mother dies later that month.  She bequests the ring with Kay’s diamond to her oldest granddaughter, his daughter with “Not-Kay.”  Instead, he takes the ring and tries to force it on his wife, his trophy, a true beauty queen, not from his social set, and not approved of by his parents.   This woman he also took dancing at the Cavalier and walking along the beach.  This woman he’s spent thirty years punishing for not being Kay.   She refuses the other woman’s diamond, one of the few times in her life she will go against him.  He takes the ring and locks it into a vault, into shadow.  It will be years before he honors his mother’s bequest and surrenders Kay’s diamond to his daughter.  The ghosts never leave him.  His daughter only learns the story of Kay from his sister.

The daughter buried her father almost four years ago now.  She wonders if, with his last breath, when he closed his eyes for the final time, whether the ghosts departed and if he was at peace.  She prays it was so.  “Not-Kay” has been gone less than a year.

Someday her own daughter will wear Kay’s diamond in the Edwardian setting, and then a granddaughter will wear it in turn.  She hopes the story will follow the ring.  The diamond has a tale to tell.

A line of trees and brush stands sentry at the back edge of my yard.  That part lies in shadow much of the day; even sunlight is barred admittance.  When I look at it, generally it evokes the sole thought that the area needs a good mucking – unintended shrubs encroaching daily, organic debris falling from the trees and gathering by the minute, etc.  But yesterday, to my delight, a bulb planted by a someone (not me) had shot up – flowered, without my notice.  The bloom was creamy white, unexpected innocence against darkness, ever nearer creeping.  This morning the bloom had multiplied; now there are three.

I glanced at the calendar this morning, and the date startled me.  Fifteen years.  I remember where I was that morning.  I remember what it felt like to see the footage replayed to cement a new world in our collective memory.  I remember what it felt like to hear the journalists repeat the stories again and again and again, disbelief sewn into every sentence.  I’m guessing you do, too.

I lived in Arlington, Virginia, that day.  I opened my front door, could smell the Pentagon burning, could have seen the smoke if I’d walked down the block and around the building in front of mine.  I could not bear to see it then.  Instead, I closed the door and cried.  My memories are nothing, I’m sure, compared to the those who lived it, those who could not help but see the devastation,  those who lost someone they loved.

My hands have touched the memorials at New York and Arlington.  Water cascading over black granite squares, red granite cantilevers set into the ground.  Names of the lost, all of them.  Silence.  Breathable heartbreak.  Profound declaration, “We will never forget.”  Promise me we haven’t.  Promise me we won’t.

On days like today, days singed on their edges by tragedy, days echoing voices lost to our previously unimaginable, gentle reminders arrive unbidden that hope remains. Because He loves us, those reminders come in forms we individually comprehend.   Mine came as white flowers flourishing under a gloomy canopy.   My prayer today is that you find your “white flower”, too.

Outside my kitchen window a small brown spider weaves a web.  I’ve watched its progress for a week now as it stretched its silk from one tall holly bush to another, entertainment for while I wash dishes.  I hate spiders, but when they stay outside the window I can deal, even appreciate that they serve a purpose.

I think my animosity toward the species stems from 4^th grade.  We lived in Arizona, and that state has a veritable zoo of its own showcase of nasty, dangerous things.  I was in bed, not sleeping (Surprise!)  and staring at the wall.  A shadow crept slowly up that wall, and knowing my own imagination could turn shadows into monsters, I froze.  No breath, no infinitesimal movement – the shadow would go away.  Only it didn’t.  It continued up the wall.  It was a roundish shadow, about the size of my 8-year old hand.  (It might be important to note that I was the tallest kid in my 4^th grade class.  You look doubtful; I stopped growing that year.  I know – painful.)  I screamed.  My parents came in and flipped on the light.  Shadow equaled a large black spider; it may have had hair.  Thus, current reflex to run shrieking anytime I see one; as I am a reasonable and responsible adult, I’m mostly able to repress said reflex.

A fierce tropical storm blew through yesterday, rain in solid sheets of stainless steel, wind that howled out pain.  Scary stuff.  Opening the back door this morning, pieces of shrubbery littered the yard and crepe myrtle blossoms decorated the grass.  Clearly, the force of nature was not something with which to be trifled.  I opened the blinds, and had almost forgotten about my 8-legged friend.  I was surprised at my (near) delight to see that he’d (How do you know if a spider is a boy or girl?) made it through, was even re-spinning his web.  He’d survived to see another sunrise.  How had he made it? (You know what’s coming.)

Winds howl, rain falls, thunder cracks, and still we go on to see another sunrise.  One foot in front of the other, we move through our lives confident that despite the storms that rage around us, we’ll survive to be productive, continue to thrive if we choose.  There will be times that we are knocked to our knees by things we can’t control or even things we set in motion ourselves, but we will stand again.  Surviving, thriving, standing – these things aren’t accomplished on our own.  They always require arms to hide within, but I learned long ago that requesting another person carry that weight was far too large a burden.  Those arms that hide me now can carry the world – do carry the world.

So, today I watch a small spider producing silk streams outside my kitchen window, and as long as he remains on his side of the glass, we’re good.  In fact, I rather like him there.  He reminds me how to survive.

Rocking back on my heels, I knelt beside the flowerbed under the front window of my little house and stared up at the azure sky arcing overhead.  Silently I marveled how such beauty could belie the reality of the hot-as-Hades day.  With my forearm I swiped at the beads of moisture that were quickly becoming rivulets streaming into my eyes.  Briefly I wondered if later looking in the mirror I’d discover a stipe of black dirt left behind as a souvenir of that swipe (Yes.).

I sighed and turned my attention back to the seemingly endless supply of weeds choking the purposely-planted shrubs in what had once been a lovingly and neatly tended border.  With a sense of inevitability, I leaned forward and again started ripping out those stubborn interlopers by their aggressively gripping roots.  One after another, methodically I removed the invaders and tossed them into the gaping mouth of the waiting black garbage bag.

One thing about yard work, it takes no focus whatsoever; so, I let my mind wander freely:  Was it time to get my own (hair) roots done (Probably.)?  Would anyone notice if I suddenly became a brunette (Yes.)? I hate getting my hair done; should I shave it all off (Uhhm, no.)?

Then, as often wont to do, my mind meandered in a more, well, substantial direction. (And you thought you were going to read about my hair.)   Now, stay with me here.  Flowerbeds are similar to our hearts in that what we plant only grows if we make sure it gets the sustenance it needs.  If we leave our little plots untended maybe things we never expected, definitely never wanted, begin to encroach; weeds, those nasty little desperados, begin to destroy what we deliberately, lovingly sowed.  Maybe it’s our deepest relationships that get blotted out by the thorny thistles that crept into place, or maybe it’s our self-esteem, perhaps it’s our walk with God, but whatever it is in our inner-most being, it needs to be cherished and tended.

In my life, I’m most likely to let weeds strangle the hard-learned truths I’ve discovered about myself.  Unfortunately, I’m willing to let the harsh, cold, nasty things others say (or I let myself believe they think) supplant those truths I should know absolutely by now (but don’t).  Once those truths have been beaten down, it takes months or even years to see them flower again.

Maybe you don’t struggle with any of this.  Maybe your gardens are tended perfectly, and you think I have completely lost it.  Maybe you’re thinking, weeds – what is she talking about? If you can’t relate, I’m glad for you, but if you can relate, then let’s agree to get out the Roundup soak those weeds. (Well, not me; I’m going to have to do it the hard way – Roundup gives me a migraine.  You probably already know this, but I pretty much do everything the hard way.)  But, please, you use the Roundup.  Let’s get rid of those weeds and tend to and cherish what needs to be cherished.

In my Phoenix living room almost 7 months ago, I sat curled into the corner of my sofa watching my father intensely and systematically wrap each and every item acquired during my former fractured lives in layers of bubble wrap and packing paper and set those pieces gently into boxes – oh, so many, many boxes.  He then taped those boxes shut with multiple overlapping (think OCD) strips of tape.  Once the packing was completed, those boxes were entrusted to the bailment of a major moving company until I landed again.

The very last week in July, I threw open a new front door to greet the moving truck and a new adventure, and an adventure that moving day proved to be.  Shortly after the two gentlemen arrived, they disappeared out the front door again and stayed gone for a measurable amount of time.  Finally, the older of the two walked hesitantly back into the house and approached me sheepishly asking me to accompany him outside to the truck; he needed to show me something.

The side doors of the truck stood open, and boxes were on display – crushed, smashed boxes; boxes with seams ripped open, contents cascading out; boxes mangled and eviscerated.  Both movers stood silently, waiting for my reaction.  I swallowed and stared.  Then I said simply, “Well, bring it in.”

The men gaped at me.  One said, “A lady yesterday cried over one box.  You’re not going to yell?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, it’s your stuff.  We’ve never seen anything this bad.  The truck was loaded wrong.”

I assessed the truck again and then the movers.  I shook my head ‘no,’ and repeated the request to bring the boxes into the house.  Then, I returned to my kitchen.

Standing at the counter I thought about those destroyed boxes and the potential consequences to what they contained.  As I stood pensively waiting, the movers began toting those cardboard wrecks into the house.  They watched me out of the corners of their eyes.  I could feel them trying to determine how close I was to losing it, but I was so far away from that point.  I was simply trying to grasp how I would feel if everything in every one of those boxes were shattered beyond recognition, beyond repair.

Enormous bright red “Fragile” stickers were slapped on all 6 sides of the third box carried past me.   “Stained Glass Lamp Shades” written in gigantic letters under those red stickers underscored the delicate contents of that box, and the irony of those red stickers proved too much for my slightly odd sense of humor.  My laughter couldn’t be restrained, and once I started laughing, the two movers couldn’t help but join.  “It’s just stuff,” I gasped to them.  “It’s just stuff.”

Here’s the thing: it is just stuff.  It can be replaced.  Some of those things have memories Gorilla Glued to them – good, bad, or even neutral memories, but the memories wouldn’t shatter even if the objects did.  Those memories are mine to do with what I will regardless of what happens to the stuff.  Would I want to have to deal with replacing my things?  No, of course not; I’m not reckless, unreasonably careless, or insane (If you know me, don’t comment.).  But ultimately, crying over anything that can’t cry over you feels like a waste of emotional energy and also, in our world, seems quite a skewed perception of what is important.  There was a time in my life I would’ve cried.  I’m not that woman anymore, and I’m grateful for that.

Sometimes it’s hard to hold onto the concept that I truly am different in Him.  Sometimes it takes a truck full of crushed moving boxes to remind me of how far He has brought me.  So, tonight I want to tell you that I’m thankful for crushed cardboard and punctured packages.  I want to tell you I am thankful for all that He has brought me through and all He will continue to lead me to do.  In Him.

Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, sits toward the end of the long chain of barrier islands known as the Outer Banks. Legend claims Ocracoke as the home and hideout of the infamous pirate Blackbeard, and depending who you ask, the native families are descendants of that blackguard’s crew. That would make me a descendant of that blackguard’s crew for this perfect, long stretch of sand, sea grass, and cedar was home to my maternal grandmother’s family. For me this barrier island reverberates with echoes of home.

I arrived almost three weeks ago seeking silence, solitude, peace, and recovery from the storms that thundered their ways through my life over the last months and years. I came seeking answers and hope, seeking sparks to rekindle a faith that had burned down to mere embers. I took long walks through the village; bivouacked for hours on the beach mesmerized by waves crashing along one of the most beautiful beaches in the world; curled into chairs on the wide screened porch of my little cottage for long stretches of time.

I found silence, and solitude. I found hope, and began to see a rekindling of my faith, but peace eluded me. And as I am very much an over-analyzer, I delved oh, so deep into my own heart and soul until a realization dawned. I may have physically left the stressors far behind in the blistering Arizona desert, but I had wrapped and packed those emotional and psychological pieces ever so carefully in my suitcase and carried them the 2400 miles with me. The location had changed, but my heart substantially had not. Though not truly an original thought, this was a hit-the-floor-on-my-knees moment.

Truth shot an arrow into my heart: somethings I more than willingly surrender, willingly forget, willingly forgive others and myself. Other things, long held things, lie buried just beneath the surface, and all one need do is run their fingers lightly along those scars, and I bleed open those long held wounds as if they were fresh slices into my fragile human skin, frail human soul.

I’m not talking small, insignificant ‘you-took-my-parking-space’ things. No, I mean real, deep, wounds that no matter how hard I prayed, I couldn’t release. And when I gathered the courage to peer even closer, the things that drove the knife deepest and then twisted it hardest weren’t the things for which I can easily lay the blame at the feet of someone else. Instead, they’re the parts that I played, the roles for which I couldn’t forgive myself.  I wondered how many times my heart could break for the very same things? How many times I could pray for forgiveness and still feel guilt? And, then something whispered to my soul Psalm 51: 1-2, 17:

1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, 2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 17 My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.

Mere arrogance, believing I know better than God, kept me from accepting the grace that He had already given. Mere arrogance kept me holding onto the pain of my own past, my own sin. The thing is that the life (or lives) that I walked when those transgressions were committed no longer existed in His mind. He’d cast them away; and if He had, then I needed to do no less. I needed to let those lives and those transgressions with them sink their way to the bottom of the deepest sea and consciously choose (perhaps daily) to see my life as He did, see myself as He did. If He believed I’m worthy of love and hope and forgiveness, who am I to argue? And, having worked that out in my over-analytical mind, peace finally descended and settled upon me. It was time to allow Him to open the doors to a renewed life, one with room for good memories but no place reserved for the darkness of my yesterdays.

With that mindset, I trekked around the backstreets of the island today and found my great-grandmother’s house. The brown shingle-sided rambling house sits by itself in a meadow, and I could envision the generations of women who came before me sitting on the front porch, and the picture in my head made me smile. Those women wouldn’t recognize their sleepy, fishing village today, but their house in its meadow just steps from Silver Lake (or The Creek as they called it) probably looks much the same, and for that my heart was glad. Home should feel familiar; as I turned away those echoes of familiarity stayed with me, and I knew they’d be replacing the space that only hours before held echoes of darkness, held echoes of sin. Truly darkness replaced by The Light.

Out past where the waves break an older man struggled to stay upright on a paddleboard; his bearing marked him for an amateur. I watched as he teetered then tottered then finally lost the fight and fell into the water.   I waited on the beach anxious to see him climb his way back onto the board. Moments later he did and knelt there for several seconds then stood again, paddled again, fell again. Process repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated… From my safe little nest on the beach I smiled. I admired his perseverance, wondered if I’d do the same.

The question seems simple when addressing a paddleboard, but it really is a broader question about life, yes? In any given situation, you stand, find your center of balance, feel safe, then comes a slightly (or much) bigger wave than you expected, and you’re no longer stable, can’t recover your center (no matter how much yoga or Pilates you do), and you find yourself tossed into the water. Now, you have a choice. Do you stay treading water, hoping against hope that the life you knew comes back around to pick you out of the depths before your legs and stamina give out, or do you climb back on the board and try again? Start all over? Keep moving forward, not giving in or up because something more lies before you out there on the horizon, something worth moving toward?

There have been waves in my life – several of them – that have knocked me into the water, and, between you and me, I have merely treaded water, sometimes for years. I have waited for those lives I knew, lives I held onto by the tips of my fingernails, to pluck me into the dry safety of their little rafts. I’ll tell you, those rafts never came. I cried, I screamed, I begged in prayer, and…nothing. I was left treading water.

The truth we avoid telling ourselves is that those rafts aren’t supposed to come. Once we’re knocked off the board, those lives fall into the water with us, and the lives, well, they don’t tread water. Instead, they sink down into the darkest, coldest depths never to be salvaged (even in a James Cameron film).

We can mourn those lives for an appropriate amount of time, but then we need leave them lie on the bottom of the ocean and turn our faces to the horizon, set our hearts on the next attempt because, truly, we don’t live in what has happened. We live in what is happening, and if all we’re doing is treading water awaiting a raft that isn’t coming, we’ll miss the magnificent moments God has planned for us right now. And if we’re seeking Him on a road we’ve already travelled, we won’t find Him waiting there either. He’s with us in the immediate moment. He’s waiting up ahead as well, but He’s not petrifying in our pasts.

So, let the waves come because sometimes the lives we’re living aren’t the lives we’re meant to live, and the only way out is being knocked into the water. Or sometimes bad things or unexpected things just happen.  Regardless of the “why,” let that life sink; let it settle into the sandy ocean floor. Then climb back on the board and paddle into the horizon, into the next chapter written.

Sitting on the beach, my toes buried in the warm sand, soft breeze cooling my already burning skin, my Dutch/German/Irish heritage ensured a decided lack of tan. Instead I burned by finite degrees regardless of the SPF promised by Coppertone.  I was too enshrined by saline scented bliss to care about my reddening skin. The beach was (is) my happy place – Atlantic Ocean stretched out before me, deepening from shades of soft moss green to deepest grey where it met an azure horizon, waves breaking on the shell-littered sand, kites flying overhead, children laughing. My book lay abandoned beside my chair. There was no way the sinking of the Lusitania could hold my attention when so much joy surrounded me. (I may have a slight ADD issue.)

Every deep breath I inhaled brought renewal, carried peace – something I’d been missing for so many long months. I knew where I was headed now, where I belonged. When God delivers He does it in huge ways, and this time had been no different. So, as I sat on the beach I whispered words of thanksgiving not just that I was at my happy place but also that I had been given answers. Then I settled in to relax and enjoy every second of a glorious day.

Two hours later, I roused from my sun-induced daze and watched with increasing interest as a man with a bucket and fishing pole strolled into my oceanfront view, stopping about 10 feet in front of me. He looked left and right as if trying to decide if he truly wanted to set-up shop at that particular spot.   Apparently, that was the place because he dropped his bucket and reached down into its depths retrieving a small, whole fish. I watched in stunned and slightly appalled disbelief as the man baited the hook at the end of his line with the little fish and cast far out into the waves.

Now, my opposition to the fisherman arose not out of his sport. My concern stemmed from the slight problem that whatever that whole fish attracted was going to be much bigger than itself, say a shark, and the fisherman was casting into waters populated by swimming children. See the problem? However, I also knew that each and every day sharks swam among the mostly (deliberately) ignorant bathers at the beach, even in the shallowest of waters. After all, it was the shark’s natural habitat, and we were the interlopers. I just did’t want the reminder while I was actually at the beach.

But as I was sitting on the beach contemplating the fisherman and his potential catch, I started thinking about how sharks in the shallows aren’t so different from our every day lives. We know the bumps and bruises and potential hazards and tragedies are out there; we just ignore them, go about our every day lives deliberately pretending that those things that could harm us aren’t weaving in and out of our day. Occasionally, we get bitten or someone we care about gets bitten by life, and we shy away from the spaces that those hazards perpetually inhabit until our hearts heal.  Then we return, a bit more wary perhaps, but we return all the same.

Returning to those places isn’t on our own strength; it can’t possibly be. There has to be something bigger than ourselves that provides the balm to heal the ragged, injured place, sets us straight again, loves us enough to convince us that going back to the site of damage, while scary or terrifying even, isn’t going to destroy us. That “something bigger” is God – omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and just as He created us, He created the literal sharks and sanctioned the figurative ones. There’s nothing we go through in this life He hasn’t already approved, already said that by His strength we will survive. We never walk alone.  Sometimes I forget this; sometimes I need a reminder like a fisherman standing directly in front of me baiting his hook with a whole fish.

In case you were wondering about my fisherman friend, my concern didn’t take long to be realized. Within moments the fishing rod bent low with the tug of something struggling on the hook. When he reeled in the line the catch proved, indeed, to be a very small shark, and, well, that was the end of my beach day.

I curl into the swing on my parents’ back porch, my eyes closed, setting the swing in motion with a single foot, the other leg tucked under me. I settle into the desert evening, the gentle breeze lifting the tendrils that have escaped my loose upswept ‘do. Everything about this moment feels relaxed and easy, something my soul cries out for desperately.

I listen to the sound of the windchimes singing in the zephyr, and same draft carries on it the scent of my father’s smoker cooking tomorrow night’s pulled pork. I smile at the memory of childhood dinners, and I think of husband #1’s description of my palate being that of a 5-year-old. He wasn’t far off: I love Kraft mac’n cheese, peanut butter and jelly, and ice cold chocolate milk; would live off of these simple pleasures if my headaches would permit. Alas, the migraines, do not – better for me, I suppose.

Jug lies at my feet softly snoring, and I think how much I love this dog and the swinging motion that brings me the quiet sense of peace pervading my being. I’ve always loved swings, would search them out even long after college when I felt stressed. There’s something about the rocking motion that calms my flustered heart. Babies feel it; maybe we just grow accustomed to it, and some of us never outgrow it – or maybe it’s a peculiarity particular to me; if so, I’ll take it.

I’m no closer to knowing where the next step along my somewhat broken and twisting path should be, but I’m lost in the soft beauty of this moment, something I’m not particularly good at. No, normally I am chasing ghosts of painfully ruined wreckages or worrying about uncertain tumultuous tomorrows. Staying right in the here-and-now requires a tremendous amount of concentration and focus, and I’m grateful for the entirety of the distraction.

I sigh deeply and open my eyes, struck immediately by the faded sun and the immediacy of the indigo twilight, a time of day I find all-encompassing.   My eyes absorb the surrounding color, and I see nothing else; this shade of purple a pure testament to His Love, His steadfast, abiding devotion. Even when I feel separate, I see Him. And I know – I simply know.

Words flood my bloodstream hitching a ride upon the squashed-pie-shaped red blood cells carrying oxygen. Sentences, phrases, hyperbole are the very thing that my heart beats, and when I’m not writing consistently I struggle for each breath, hungry for the next gulp of air, sure that each sip will be my final farewell. (I’m not being the teensiest bit dramatic or anything. Please feel free to roll your eyes.) But in the past weeks, my lifeblood has drained away as if my muse had sneaked out the window leaving nothing behind her except the curtains flapping in the breeze; like a teenage girl told she couldn’t see that boy anymore.   And how I have chased after her! No stone has been left unturned, no friend’s heart unprobed, no family member left unquestioned. Nope. She’s just gone. Gone, gone, gone.

How do you go on about your daily life when the outlet you count on – your pressure release valve – has rusted closed, and there is no CLR anywhere to be found? I’m a bit afraid my neuroses (Come on, you have them, too.) have replaced all my beloved words on their lazy-river-drift-along in my circulatory system. Not pretty. Well, you pretend she’s coming back and act as if nothing’s changed until she does, of course. (No, not really.) My only answer is to search within and see if I’m off course. Check, that task complete, and I can honestly say, “I don’t know.”

So, perhaps that’s it, this lack of direction that sent my muse scurrying for the distant beckoning blue-topped hills, but I’m still left with the yearning to write something worth reading when it occurs to me that this soul search may be worth scripting. (Of course, it may not be, and in that case, please feel free to go do something else. I’ll never know.) And I began to wonder what fills you then leaves you feeling desolate and deserted when it takes a hiatus from your life: money, friends, hobbies? What has you surfing the barrel of a wave one day then crashes and smashes you against the rocks when it proves a fickle friend? And, then, of course, why do we let these things break us? And how many times are we going to let these external things shatter us until we finally grasp that these pieces of our daily puzzles fit together only to show the world our visage and not the part of us that really matters: our soul.

I get it that not every one is a safe harbor in which to shelter and wait out our storms. Not everyone is even safe to ask directions to those harbors. But eventually you have to trust someone, be vulnerable to someone. (That is soooo not easy for me to say.) But if we have a God who loved us enough to die for us, then we also have a God who loved us enough to bring safe people into our lives to show us that even when the muse does climb out the window, when the wave smashes you into the rocks, when the storms block the harbor, we are not lost and alone. The muse will come home, you’ll live to get back on that board, and the storms will clear. That’s hope. That’s faith. And I can’t imagine it gets better or more real than that.