I’m letting a restorative wave crash over my life. One that will wash the beach clean of frustrations and angers, rid me of tension that leaves my spine stiff and sore, and will clear my mind of the endless chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.
It’s been a long time coming.
Like waiting for a tsunami.
The warnings have been out for days, the nonstop preparations, the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. And then the sirens.
I don’t evacuate. I wish to be purged. To be changed. To be scrubbed clean by the raw power of the ocean.
And then the wave comes.
It is tall. It Is ferocious. It is just and nondiscriminating.
I am roiled in the water. Powerless. Not even flailing. Not panicking.
Just surviving one breath at a time.
And then it is over.
The beach is clean save for some interesting driftwood and a starfish.
I have a blank slate, and I can begin drawing – creating this new future – from scratch. I am both new and restored. A paradox that only the sea can explain.
Is it somehow cognitive dissonance to demand an interlude much less an interlude of tranquility to manifest out of thin air? I think so.
Tranquility, I think, grows slowly. It is not rushed, demanded, or ordered about. It is a rock hosting moss – the green coating develops slowly and requires one to be still.
Tranquility can be – is – precarious. For most of us, it can be destroyed in an instant. Soft falling snow on a peaceful landscape turns into a tree crashing through one’s roof. Or frozen pipes burst. Or the power goes out. The quiet happiness of home and hearth is destroyed in an instant.
To disassociate so rapidly from tranquility, deep and quiet and blissful, to stress. To disaster. To mayhem. Is perilous
and
dangerous and damaging.
A disaster of its own.
Modern life is not adapted for this.
The natural biological response for these incidents is for the primitive brain – the one we aren’t allowed to operate with in this the first quarter of the first century of the latest millennium – to take control. Due to this, because of this, as a direct result of this, our bodies and our brains are flooded with the chemicals that depend on fight, flight, or freeze, and we are allowed to do none of those and be deemed to be good people, good parents, good employees, good anything.
And they certainly do nothing to help us with the situation at hand.
But there we are — swimming (treading water or maybe drowning) in the toxic miasma of an old response inadequate to the disaster at hand. And so we need an interlude of tranquility to reset and restore, which now feels like an impossibility.
I can demand satisfaction.
Challenge the fates to a duel.
Rail against an unjust universe.
Or I can sit quietly here with my right hand on my heart and my left hand petting the small, rhythmic breathing bundle of unconditional love known as Emmylou-the-Dachshund and wait for the moss to grow while I meditate on all the good things still available to me.
W. Va. Fur and Root 