Gentle Beginnings

"O ye who have your eyeballs vext and tired
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea"
- John Keats, On the Sea

Very early and quiet as if there had not been fireworks and Auld Lang Syne just hours before. The street lights are still on as I drive toward the waterfront. Dotted like the last of the Christmas tree, and the sky is beginning to change. The sea is, like the inhabitants who nest by her, sleeping and doesn't stir. I must go down into that seeming darkness to ascend the cliff. There were two passings during the year. One I wrote of and one I could not bring myself to voice. I think of them, and of Theodore Roethke, who said, "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow". I don't stop at the waterfront - the car turns toward the upward climb. And already the sky is lighter that when I first looked down the hill.

There were family who came home from long adventures in other countries. They returned with hugs and nervousness, and excitement. Bought houses, took jobs, and began old lives anew all over again. It's as if they had never been gone and their absence was a story. A story told in parts. At the top of the cliff there is my old man of the sea - Rangitoto. Not that he is really mine. He belongs to everyone when they sight him and look across the water to that majestic permanence. The sea and I are glassy eyed. But we are awake.



This brand new light is soft, and I almost motionless with the ocean. John Keats wrote,

"-then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink."

I can imagine fame slipping silently into the sea with barely a ripple - insignificant. But love? Love drapes the sky and holds the deep silent. To sink is to be loveless. Love is both here and in faraway stories.

There was laughter - at life, each other, at little slips of the tongue, at how confused we get by things that are supposed to be second nature. There was discovery and uncovery and sometimes putting pieces back together again. Perhaps this too slips into the sea. And there was having a passion and quoting e.e. cummings, "i thank You God for most this amazing day". The sun paints a glow on the houses down in the bays. All those hearts beginning to stir. Who will rise to the moment? We expect each day to follow upon like the waves - sometimes repetitively predictable. Sometimes tumultuous, saying "the real thing and not the expected thing" as Virginia Woolf was once described. But there is a gold shadow across the shores of the bays - a gentle reality comes unexpectedly even to those who have so often basked in the warmth of an early sun.