It’s Valentine’s Day this week, but I have never seen much point to it other than having an excuse to eat more chocolate until this year. I’ve had number of long time dreams coming into alignment in my life at last and I found myself full of grateful love for the many people who have helped me get to this point. In doing so I also discovered a theme; a presence that has always been there, guiding me, that is no human but at the same time, it is essential to our existence as humans.
Not to mention I’m about a month late with reflecting on the past year (even years) and all that led to me reaching the fortunate place I now exist within.
Water: I am the Tide
Water has been a theme through my life; first with the cassette tapes of childhood; Beethoven’s Fir Elise playing over crashing waves of a seashore and the call of gulls.
It lingers in my love of Romantic era piano music which runs scales and forms like water over rock.
It draws me to settle in places where water flows, in rivers, lakes and seas.
It mirrors my own life so far, ever changing and never the same bubbles tossed about the top.
It rests in my favourite colours; calm blues and storm-tossed blacks.
I am water and water is me.
Water Through The Years
I first saw Riverdance; somewhere between seven and eight (forgive me mom, I cannot actually recall). It’s a foggy evening in my mind. I remember impressions; the red seats, we were high up, near the edge. The band, full of fiddlers, pan flutes and drums. The rows of flashing feet in unified treble steps. The backdrops changing from a shimmering green, to blue, to purple, red and back again. The grace of hands and feet which made me believe I watched faeries twirling below me.
But the music; it remembers me and I remember it. Songs which pulled at memories of a place I had never been; high suns, rocky shores, forgotten moors and hidden caves.
But then water became feared, for a time. I pushed myself beyond my spirit of faerie dreams and attempted to be a Viking voice full of a giant’s confidence. Being shy was not valued, not good and yet, like water cannot be forced into a shape for long, I was not either. Lifeguarding was not for me.
I was drawn to the University of Victoria, on Vancouver Island solely because of its situation by the seaside and fond memories of childhood summers spent further up the island; among ancient tree spirits, busy crabs and the sand which seemed to stretch to a forever horizon when the tide was out.
There is magic on the island, it sleeps, silent and still until you rustle through the ferns and peer between branches of budding cherry blossoms. It waits for you among the dragons, who sleep in the driftwood upon the shore.
Then water became beautiful again. Water became the voice that called me to a home only the deepest shores of my mind knew.
I crossed a vast and cold ocean after my studies finished. I walked the edges of another seashore. The British Isles had a whisper of home to them too. I wandered along the Thames, a river which had seen millions of people and there are still mysteries dropped, both accidentally and intentionally in its depths.
I stood at the edge of white cliffs and looked across to a distant shore. I crossed rocky waters to a green and gold shore; where my faeries first stepped before they followed ancestors to my birth home. Here, the rain crashed in sheets, puffins hid in hollows and craggy rocks loomed like leviathans in the fog.
This was the place of stories. This was where my water began; upon these rocky shores of green moss and yellow thistle, bent ash and curled oak. I was home, in a way I had never felt before.
This feeling struck when I got lost on Inis Mor, on a day of gold sun. I had walked into a sheep field full of rocks shaped like checker pieces. The sea and sky were the only creatures around me for company. So I sang. In my head, I heard the beat of the dancing drums which formed a ceilidh between myself and the sky.
Then the sun rolled away as clouds pulled up from the horizon. A light pitter patter tumbled down. I darted down the hill, leaping burial mounds and badger holes until I reached a harbour where I settled with a cup of tea inside a white-washed cafe.
An old radio played folk tunes that kept me there, with the rickety wood chair and white laced table top, steam twirling from my mug even as the melodies took me away, deep under the hill, far under babbling brooks, where the Sidhe hide since the days of humans.
Eventually, I left those places which felt like home, as we must leave all places. I crossed back over the ocean and returned to the house by the lake of many colours and the lake which keeps the Ogopogo. I stayed in that house, the home where I grew up. But my heart called for the drum of waves, like the bodhrán’s beat under the chirp of a fiddle.
So I went back to the seashore. I returned to the waters where I now play Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau in celebration of the sea; gulls call in the distance and storms rock the night. As ever and always, I play the rhythms of the water, while I hum songs to the seaweed which washes upon the shore.
In Graceful Thanks
Water has always been there. From the start of my life it has supported and challenged me, it is home. No matter where I am or where I am going, it will follow me. For that, I am thankful and I hope it will be here, for countless more generations of humanity to celebrate.
It is not called Life Blood for no reason after all. We are water and water is us.
A favourite folk tune I came across after recently watching The Song of the Sea (done by the same company who did The Secret of Kells.http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLJmyUkJquU
“Sea of Tranquility,” was the name of the tape that we would play for you when you were tiny. It was full of classical music set to a backdrop of ocean waves and sounds. And while floating warm in the womb, you heard the thrumming of my heart, which when you first met the ocean, it probably reminded you of being safe and home. Water is magic! And while you may not have found lifeguarding a good fit, you were always a easy and graceful swimmer and no one ever drowned on your watch. Enjoy your Valentine’s week. I hope you can get out and walk by the ocean, remembering how much you are loved. keep writing!