"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "
--norman maclean
when i was in middle school, i went to camp every summer. my camp was at the beach, and we did all sorts of field trips, outings, and sleep-overs away from camp. that place changed my life. those experiences crafted a whole life for me, and i am still applying all those lessons, all these years later. i still go to the beach expecting to see amazing things. i sit on the waterline, and i hear the song the waves sing, watch them clap their hands in the foamy crests, and marvel at the life that teems under and over all that water. the rhthym of the waves, the sets they make, the pull of them, as they follow what's on the bottom, the way you can read them after you've watched them every summer of your life, and how after a day in the water, when you lay down on your bed to sleep, you can still feel their pull and push, that rhthym that beats a four-count measure in my head in the pool, and a four-count measure in my heart, sometimes that's all that gets me to sleep at night.
i remember being in the water off key west, marveling through my snorkle mask at the beauty of the reef. i remember the overwhelming compulsion to close my eyes. and i did close them. i relaxed into the water, warm as a bath, and soft as silk. i have no idea how long i floated there, above the fish, and below the sky, bathed in salt water, rocked by the gentle waves, with the sounds of the boat and people around me muffled by the sea. and i remember this overwhelming feeling of being home. i was so taken aback with that thought...i had never been here before. and then i remember that i certainly had been someplace awfully similar. in that flash, i remembered my mother's womb, and the waters of my birth. this was a profound and cataclysmic realization, and just as soon as i grasped it, it slipped away, again. i understood why i had been pulled to the water, why we are all pulled toward it, why it must be the sign of our birth and re-birth. and all those days of camp, all the family trips to the beach, the pools, the rivers, the tanks, the lakes, all the drops of all the water coalesced into an ocean of such size and depth and width that i was left speechless, crying into my mask, overwhelmed at the scope of such love.
at camp, we used to go to the aquarium every summer...we went to two aquariums, one in port a and the other in corpus. the one in corpus was my favorite. it was brand new the first time i went, and to this day, i still associate the smell of new carpet with that building and those tanks full of such strange and wonderful creatures. i remember standing in front of one of the big amphibian tanks, and seeing this massive kemp's ridley turtle swim by me. the counselor standing next to me said that she loved turtles best of all, because they looked so wise and gentle, and that they reminded her of God. that comment has never really left me, and i have rolled it over and over in my mind, sometimes looking at turtles, sometimes looking at other things, and sometimes looking at nothing but the back of my eyelids.
my first pet was a turtle. his name was jeremiah, and i think i was about three when my dad brought him home to me. i remember that he lived in my room, in a big bowl. and i liked him. at some point, mom and dad convinced me that jeremiah needed to go live at the park, by the creek. i don't know if this is because they were tired of taking care of their three year old's pet, or if jeremiah died and they didn't want to traumatize me by burying him in the box my miss piggy tennis shoes came in. at any rate, what i remember of jeremiah is good. he was green. he was my friend. he was familiar to me. i always think of him whenever i see a turtle, big or little.
i started reading the "dark tower" series of books when i was in junior high. i know, stephen king novels in junior high...what can i say, i was advanced. a turtle plays a large part in the stephen king cannon of stories, and until i tried to read stephen hawkings "a brief history of time", i never put that into perspective, thinking that the turtle was just a nice, comfortable, familiar writer's device. hawking relates this story: " A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
being the curious person that i am, i did a little research about this quote, because when i read this story, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. (it was a similar experience to the one i had when i was putting a four-year old suzy jones to bed, when she whispered in my ear, "sometimes i dream about God's wife...she wears red." but that's another story...) come to find out, the second avatar of vishnu was a turtle, who carried the elephant who carried the world on his back. under him was nothing but the sea of primordial milk, which contains the fourteen most beautiful and spectaular gifts ever given. that's a pretty interesting story, no matter how you slice it, i think.
do i believe that God is a turtle? ...no. am i converting to hinduism?...certainly not. all i'm saying is that sometimes, i think we forget things that should not be forgotten. we burn books that should not be burned. we declare heresy where there is none. we forget that God is much bigger than we can ask or imagine. and that God is everywhere, and in everything, calling us into communion, into community, into wholeness and holiness, just like the ocean calls us to come and swim and be made clean, and remember what it means to be home.
that's what i think, anyway.
mil besos,
rmg
1 comment:
Good post Rachie Poo.
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