Nights

A night like this, when the air is damp after the rain, and all our tasks are done, we sit by the garden. Watch the resident frog jump about and keep still. The giant and ancient bullfrog who jumps out of the earth on nights like this, propping out into the middle of our conversation, only a foot away from where I am sitting then plays dead. It makes me smile. Even frogs are hungry for attention, so last night, after a couple of years of seeing his green, amphibious form I finally gave him what he needs. A name. The bull frog is now Prince. And no I have no immediate need to kiss him.

Nights like this, after the laughter and the advices I’ve spewed to the young ones, I settle here in the vastness of this white space. Taking words and attempting a symmetry of thoughts or at least some coherence.

Sadness is as inevitable as breathing and dying. It pumps in and out of us like blood. But the sadness I sometimes feel, is a sadness that is almost akin to peace.. Or hope. It’s a quiet one, an acceptance of what is not in my life at the moment, and the possibilities of what I have and what I may lose or gain in the times ahead. Loss will always bring with it a certain melancholy, but through time it evolves into a gift. This knowing, this exuberance for living. Loss teaches you that joy is hard-earned, and every opportunity at happiness must be celebrated. That the strands of our lives wound and unwound every single day into permutations of hellos and goodbyes, remembrance and determination.

Something in tonight’s cold reminds me of my first drop into the sea. Without the divemaster to control the gauges, check the air pressure, adjust the depths and balance my buoyancy in the water, I was suddenly, truly alone , 60 feet from the surface, struggling to find a sense of balance as bubbles float and water enters through my panicky mouth. A point comes where the disorienting shock wears off and the fear of drowning leaves. And there I was, finally,wholly aware. There, in the middle of my new blue universe.

Here, you fin with your heart,the sound of waves bouncing off corals and creatures. And you have no recourse but to put all of your mind in the present, not only because here lives an achingly untamed brand of beauty, but because in this world, a little misstep, a few psi off, a few meters more and the water can literally sink you to blackness.

Diving is an act of becoming. You leave all your hubris up in the surface. And as you sink into another you, everything else fades. Except the awareness that in this depth we are merely small fishes swimming through.