I've realized lately that I have spent the last twenty years closing off and bricking up a part of me that I didn't realize was so important. The Daughters asked me the other day what element I thought I belonged to. Air, Earth, Water or Fire. I know that I have always had a firey temper and my parents have always chastised me for that... but it has been quick to flare and quick to fade. More and more as I get older I realize that there is no point in having a temper because all it does is hurt me in the end. I remember when we had our first cat while still living in Ontario... one day I was heading out the door to go to town and Sir Arsewipe was waiting for me in the car. I went to get the cat to put him out so that we wouldn't find any deposits when we got home and the bugger ran off down the hall to hide under a bed... which was a normal behavior for him when he didn't want to go out. I stomped down the hall in a fit of rage and as I did so he turned tail and ran between my feet. I whirled around headed after him so I could catch him before he hid somewhere else and wiped out landing resoundingly on the floor. On my way down I struck my elbow and scraped up my back on a bookshelf that was in the hallway and ever since then I have had a slipped disk... I'm not sure if the slipped disk can be attributed directly to that incident but it certainly didn't help... so definitely it would be easy to think of fire as my element.
Since the other day when the girls asked me what was my element, I have been thinking about it and I have realized that it is not fire. Even with my firey temper, I think more than anything water is my element. That doesn't mean that I can't have a tempestuous temper... let's remember that the ocean can rear it's ugly head and be hungry in it's fierceness too. But when it is calm there is something that is so attractive and alluring. Am I attractive and alluring... I don't know, maybe at one time I was. But I do know that I am deep. There are depths of me that no one will ever touch just as there are depths in the ocean that no one will ever know.
For twenty years I have lived away from the ocean and I can safely say that I miss it like nothing I have ever missed before. I even miss the fog. There is something silent and still in me when I am around the ocean and there is something that touches my deepest self when I watch the waves rolling in on shore. Fire scares me but the ocean... never.
I have been lucky enough years ago to have been able to spend time with friends on a cabin cruiser numerous times, and if I could choose my life it would be running a boat into the wind, standing on the bow with the spray whipping up over my face every time she digs in under a swell. I have been lucky enough to stand on the deck of a trawler with the whales playing beneath as they rolled onto their sides to stare at me leaning over the edge. I have been lucky enough to drift through a mile long and who knows how deep school of jelly fish and watch them drifting with the current in a ballet of grace and beauty. I have been lucky enough to watch plankton glow in the dark of night just beneath the surface of the sea.... and heard them too... they do make a sound not unlike the sound of the Aurora. It is a faint tinkling sound. I have been lucky enough to watch porpoises frolicking in the wake of our boat as we cruised along on a sunny evening as the sun was setting. And all the time I was experiencing these things I never thought to look up and watch the birds... kittywakes and gulls that would ride the air currents... but that was not my element... No, it was the ocean below that caught my attention... the living, breathing, heaving ocean. I am so looking forward to feeling it close again and feeling the tides of my blood syncing with the ocean's ebb and flow.
You see... I realize that it is somewhere that I am meant to be.....
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