Tag Archives: happiness

Like the sea itself…

Photo taken that time that I walked out into the ocean wearing my wedding dress and returned wearing rags...

Photo taken that time I walked out into the ocean wearing my old wedding dress…

I’ve been reading a lot of Rachel Carson lately, for a project that I’m working on.  Her writing is beautiful to me, as someone who comes more alive when I am on the ocean, feeling the wind in my hair.  I get the sense that Rachel is also of a like mind when it comes to the spiritual power of being close to the ocean and its “surge of beating life.”  An excerpt from The Rocky Coast:

Like the sea itself, the shore fascinates us when we return to it, the place of our dim ancestral beginnings.  In the recurrent rhythms of tides and surf and in the varied life of tide lines there is the obvious attraction of movement and change and beauty.  There is also, I am convinced, a deeper fascination born of inner meaning and significance.

When we go down to the low tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself–the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.  For us as living creatures it has special meaning as an area in or near which some entity that could be distinguished as Life first drifted in shallow waters–reproducing, evolving, yielding that endlessly varied stream of living things that has surged through time and space to occupy the earth.

To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalog its life.  Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores…

how to charm me…

For years I had a print of a couple kissing in a train station hanging my bedroom.  It’s not the exact one above, but was very much like it.  I got the print while I was an undergraduate in college, and was probably dreaming a bit too much about passionate kissing and not enough about my studies…

Over the years I’ve had a few good kisses.  Some that’ve even held a candle to the one in the photograph that hung on my wall for so many years.

But of late, that’s definitely escalated.  There was that one in Times Square, and the one at Griffith Observatory, and the one at Sacre Coeur at sunset.  Not to mention Montreal, Portland, Cape Cod, Avignon, San Francisco, Brussels, Florence….and one very memorable smooch while I was sitting on the beach in Santa Monica.

And then there’s that one coming up at an airport in just a few hours, where I intend to throw down my travel bags and kick up my heel just like the girl in the photo above…

Previous “How to Charm Me” posts

that things can happen…

“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.” – Karen Blixen Out of Africa, 1937

I’ve had the thought lately that I shouldn’t speak about how satisfied I am with my life right now, because that will somehow jinx the goodness of things.  But on the other hand, it seems a shame not to acknowledge beauty and joy when they occur, or to keep too great a worry of “what ifs” in my mind that I can’t appreciate the present state of things.

So I will just say it.  Things are really good.  Unimaginably good.  And it’s hard for me to think of a time that I’ve been any happier than I am right now.  When I sit on my back porch in the mornings and reflect about the various comings-and-goings of people and events at chez Remy, I often feel as though this is just a happy bubble of a dream that turned into a life much more interesting and enjoyable than any I’d ever imagined for myself.  It’s a strange feeling, indeed.  But also very very good.

Right now my mind’s awhirl with memories as I’m packing for our move to a house that’s a few blocks away from where we live now.  As I do so I’m shedding even more weight from the past (things not used in over a year are being given away), and being intentional about the kind of home that I want… Simple.  Comfortable.  Clean.  Bright.  Warm.  Organized. Artful.  Roomy.  At the beginning of 2012 I expressed a wish to find a home that was truly home, and I’ve found that now.  Do you remember what I said?:

my biggest goal of 2012 is to find a home–not a rented temporary space like where I now live, but a place where I walk in the door at night and know just where I am. Where the kitchen is familiar, where morning light comes in the front window, where there’s a garden of flowers and herbs. In my imagination my home has plaster walls and creaky wood floors and a porch with a wicker chair.

This new house has all of the above–rich wood floors throughout the downstairs, a broad front porch with a swing(!) and plenty of room for a wicker chair, a backyard landscaped with native plants, more types of lavender than I could keep track of, and an ample kitchen herb garden as well as several fruit trees. And of course it has some rosebushes, too.

Perhaps it feels a bit superficial to be so excited about our new house–because I know it won’t necessarily make me any happier than I am now.  But at the same time, it’s also satisfying to see the simple desires that I expressed so clearly just a few months ago coming to fruition.  Perhaps the last piece of my life that’s felt unsettled since the divorce was the finding of a home-place.  And this is it.  And I think it’s about time.