in which a fossil finds employment
<because we do not ALWAYS write about shoes or dresses, just FREQUENTLY>
Bill brought me a little patch of tiled flooring he found on a beach in Point Richmond, California. One of so many little hexagonal-tiled bathrooms in the world, it can’t be the only one to have made its way into the ocean.
It reminds me of a few enormous, crumbling houses we found in Eastern Europe and the rounded building stones that would be in the streams nearby. I remember a beach in Boston that seemed like it was made of brick fragments and nothing else, and I remember thinking, even standing on the evidence of it, that the sea coming to buildings or buildings going to the sea still seemed like completely equal impossibilities.
It’s not the concept, just the timing that’s wrong. Makes me think that the ocean is full of bathtubs and finned chevrolets and airplanes and dinette sets, all of which would be strange and too-early remnants of something that’s not finished yet.
So, inland the thing came, and now it’s my paperweight. Taking the long view of things (and accounting for the impressive longevity of rocks and such) I do sort of wonder exactly what are its chances, after passing out of my ownership, of ending up in the ocean again.
I don’t know why, but this lovely musing, and the thought of the “impressive longevity of rocks and such” (especially such) made me think of this passage:
—
from Gift from the Sea
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
—
happy tuesday to you!
regarding the previous comment – i have a very old copy of lindbergh’s “gift from the sea” which i treasure. and now loving your paperweight even more!
xo