By Lina Feuerstein
Sometimes, when you wake in the morning, all you see is something gray and shapeless. Sometimes, when you look up and out you notice there is no horizon and the sun rises from you do not know where and the shadows lighten and you do not know how. Sometimes, when this happens, you are walking by the sea. When you are walking by the sea, the ocean hums in your ears but your eyes have no understanding of where Ocean ends and Atmosphere begins. You smell the salt and conceive of clouds that cull the star-struck scintillas of this day’s leaden light, as elastic scatterings of massless particles transform sea and sky into one cinereal pearl.
Waves break.
You’re not sure if what is moving in front of you, or through you, is a wave of water or air. Because you are not used to things being in-between--undetermined, not-quite-known--you might think the earth is mourning, as it births itself, again. You might think this astral, ashen color belongs to a story of grief. A hair pulses on your neck; a capillary twists in your heart; a cell of your interstitium sings, as it recognizes its Mother in the formlessness of things.
The ocean’s rhythm slows your mind and you tap a temple to steady yourself. The current shows you how to let a primal feeling flow, a depth-defying drum that reminds you of an ancestral ache that is always never not present around you, for you, within you.
There is only what is, the ocean says.
The beauty of our ancient heart. The blessing of our ancient home.
On mornings like this, a piece of driftwood floats upon the waves and it helps you delineate the shoreline from the sky. The driftwood looks like it is the only thing floating in this universe. It gives you direction, a reference point, and it looks weightless, like it is floating in the air. So much so, that you’re not sure if you are floating, too.
Nails sticking upward and outward from the wood look like crooked crucifixes and are full of red and orange rust that speaks of ships that no longer sail: corroded hulls, decaying keels.
You watch the driftwood float. It soothes you, the watching of it, as you rehearse a story of its coming-into-being in your mind: a man with daughters whose curls will fly in the wind when he teaches them how to sail. The younger one, who is curious about travel and the world and the sea, would take to it the quickest. The older one, not so much. She is more of an interior traveler, always speaking to ghosts, but she is likely to give the world a good try. The man and his daughters – they give you something to hold. Stories always give us something to hold. That’s how they become holy. Stories are holy . The stories of me are also always stories of you: a contest lost, a petal dropped, a plant over-watered, a pet under-loved, a surgery postponed, a birthday missed, a secret forsaken, a hat forgotten, a bone unearthed. Stories make up the sense of things when morning brings a truth of the senselessness of things. They help us take things up, so that we can let them go. Especially on mornings like this one, when you wake to the gray and the shapeless, and there seems to be no horizon, even as you walk by the sea.
Lina Feuerstein is an artist, a writer, and a teacher. She runs a company, Words We Live By, that combines energy healing with academic assistance for kids of all ages. Her nonfiction, flash, and poetry have appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Forecast Journal, and Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. She is working on her first book.

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