An Attempt to be Deep (Like the Ocean)

It occurred to me today how life in this desert house could actually be compared to living on the shore of the sea.

In my imagination I look out my window and the view of the ocean looks calm and peaceful today.  But some days I look at the world and from where I stand the water looks angry and frightening.  On those days I want to keep my family inside and protect them from the cold harsh realities that I can see rising too close to us.

Time flows like that imaginary river outside, the one that runs to the sea.  Sometimes higher up the river may freeze completely, but then it will thaw and flow again.  Even frozen moments in time cannot stop time from moving on.

I've never been sailing, so I wonder if sailing out to sea with my family would be anything like the trips we have taken away from home in the past.  Most of our travels have been short excursions to see family.  We always return home with replenished joy.  But I can't forget the journeys that took us so far from home we could no longer see the "shoreline," which I think of as a finish line we cross when we pass the sign that says "Welcome to _______" (the place I call home).  I think of how out there on the water, with no familiar landmarks (without landmarks at all), it could be so easy to become lost.  The worst thing that could happen would be to never find our way back home.  Luckily that never was a worry on our trips, for we were never without people to tell us where we were or where to go, but it is good to remember how lost we would be if we could not go home again.  Once or twice our journeys were too long and if no one had been watching, I would have kissed the dirt when I finally returned with sea legs to stand on my own ground again.  Not that I know what it is like to have sea legs, but I have known what it is like to rollerskate for so long that walking afterward felt heavy instead of flowing.  Is that what sea legs feels like?

Even the inside of my home reminds me of the sea.  Sometimes while my family sleeps I hear the sounds as they breath in and out, a pattern like the sound of waves pushing forward and pulling back on the shoreline.  Just as the tides rise and fall again, so many things follow the ebb and flow pattern day after day after day.  Children, clothes, and dishes are dirty, then clean, dirty, then clean.  My husband's shirts are ironed, then wrinkled.  The lawn is mowed, then tall, watered, then thirsty.  Sometimes we are shouting and sometimes we are kissing.  Sometimes our own spring tide rises so high we have to stay on high ground to avoid being engulfed.  Sometime hurricanes of heartache blow in floods and break the windows with their power.  And there have been sunsets so bright and beautiful they have changed the colors inside, but never for very long.

Home is the best place.  It is calming to know that all things follow a pattern and I find inexplicable joy when in it instead of the mundane I see the beauty.