healing waters

Some tension on the flesh-and-blood end had me wanting to bail before dinner, but a cooling-off walk around the block with the closer of my two siblings helped my troubled soul to chill out, and I made a much more graceful exit post-dessert, driving home through bleak streets and grey clouds, attempting to make sense of a sea of emotions and being unable to, venting to God because I don't want to bother anyone on a holiday weekend and He seems to be okay with my salty mouth and aching soul laid bare.

But with a full gas tank and looking so melancholy that even the attendants were trying to cheer me up, I began to drive towards the little bit of golden I could see in the sky, detouring from the route home to the lake when the clouds suddenly became so panoramic and vast and a deep blue-grey swirling over the hemisphere, and a band of golden on the horizon over the white-cap-flecked water, I could see the surf from the exit and knew I could find solace here.



Two of my former softball teammates were hanging out on the pier, people I didn't know very well but we were euphoric under the kaleidoscopic clouds deepening to dusky rose and blazing gold and rich blues over the swirling water crashing into the rocks and over the walkway like the ocean, the wind blowing my hair out as I huddled in a hoodie on the platform, wishing I had my camera, but knowing I'd miss this moment if I ran back to get it. The 1-pixel snapper on the phone and my memory would have to do.

We walked down to the beach, where the surfers were out and the sun set over pools in the sand, as seagulls flew silhouetted into the horizon and the water glided within inches of our feet as the darkness deepened. We walked back and I watched the water swirl some more before heading home, wondering why the turbulence calms me so intensely.

it don't rain under the water, it don't rain inside my heart...

Too beautiful to make art tonight, taking care of unfinished business at the library, having gone down by the water once and feeling its call again. A lack of power cord means no shots from today, but this place of rocks and vegetation and water has been traversed before on days with calmer waves and the encroaching golden glow of sunset from the year past.

If I wasn't so pragmatic, so thriving on interaction with other likeminded souls, if I wasn't so provincial and so rooted, I would have left long ago for a coast next to ocean long ago.

It's been a year since everything felt like it unraveled, and I'm glad I came through a little wiser and less dependent, and I don't wish things stayed the way they were, but the way that lives get woven together and then ripped out like none of it ever happened is unnerving. I guess it's part of the process, and others have been through worse. I just wish I could wash the lingerings away.

to the lonely sea and the sky

The chemistry of color turned out beautiful and went awry, the millefiori textures of mint green, teal, and orange-red flaked off the clay into shards of intricate beauty. I saved them because I want to use that color scheme again for something.

We took a walk afterwards down by the water. I love the way it feels like a beach town, with the tattered carnival decor, the condos on the shore, the old doubles with pinwheels and petunias and chipped plaster saints in the flower beds. She used to work down there at an Irish pub with a stone patio, bocce ball courts, and
lovely metalwork all around.



She knows most of the neighbors and we stopped often, having conversations about hookers in the alleys, graffiti writers and art we've been loving, and hostas in our gardens, as the neighbor's radio played "Kashmir," the clematis coiled around trellises and along stone walls next to lush ferns and plants that look so otherworldly green and tropical one wonders how they grow in this land of rust and snow.

(these photos are stolen from a housing thread and look like they were taken in the fall and do not do this justice)






The red sun dropped further in the sky toward the waiting lake. If I could ever live down here in an old shotgun house with a scrap metal frame to grow grapes on I would, to be able to sit out on a porch and see the water, drink tea and scrawl in notebooks would be a dream come true.