eight and four

It was after six, and the sun was setting across the ocean, painting all the clouds in reds and yellows.  The air was light, crisp, and tasted of the salt water.  We exited the car, I hopped over the guardrail and fence, and knelt at the edge of the rock face.

Twenty feet below, in this heaven-cut alcove in the cliff face, was a sight I could never un-see.  The waves would roll in, bottleneck, and swarm against the back wall, lashing up the rock face and kicking mist and spray into a hazy fog that seemed to hang in the air.  The last wave rolled back against the next one coming in, braiding their streams together.  Parts of the braid met transition so smooth that the chop and froth of the water was peeled back to reveal crystal cylinders of current, rolling one glistening sunbeam off the next, the abdominals of the melee crunched tight and appearing beautiful to my eyes.  The motion of it all ebbed and flowed, huge waves crashing up ten, fifteen feet higher than the top edge of the rocks, with impossibly quick currents blending in and out.

I stood up and stole my gaze away when I heard the kids call.  I returned to the roughly shaped wooden fence, and lifted them over, the older one, then the younger.  Eight and four years old at the time.

With a shaky voice I told them to hold the fencepost as I arranged myself at the cliff’s edge again, and motioned them over to me, one at a time.  They sat beside me as I wrapped my big arms around them, terrified out of my mind for their safety.  If you asked me in that moment to trade my life for peace of mind about what we were doing, I’d be scrambling for the pen to sign at the dotted line.

I watched them as they watched this painted canvas of the gods; I listened to the wind for a change in breeze and tempo.  I remember how wide my eyes had opened as they let in the light of the sunset and caught water’s reflections.  I remember feeling their young hearts beat in their chests as the watched the orchestral chaos below.

Belive this as fact:  There is nothing more beautiful than the innocent awe of a child.

When I could bear the fear no longer, I sat back on the flat rock and dragged the protesting kids back to safety on the other side of that rickety guard rail.

I meant to take another look for myself, but, for some reason which I cannot for the life of me remember, I didn’t.  I’m a fool.

What makes this memory so special to me is not in it’s uniqueness, or it’s stirring of my passion to be a father someday, or the intese beauty of the moment, or the subject matter itself, or the timing…  but that its one memory of many I have of it’s like.  There were many good times, full of trust, and enjoyment, and wonder.  There’s a history, and a story: one worth telling, recalling and revisiting.

My life has come and gone, and that which I loved and learned to live alongside has swept away with the brilliance and natural movements of those braided streams.  That life died slow, and in agony, and in gruesome enough fashion to well-balance the sublime and vital peaks at the high points of it’s pathway.

There’s so much argument about fighting the good fight, and getting back on the saddle, and how there’s more fish in the sea, and on and on this culture of survival goes.  I am content in my death.  I promise.  My days are spent in the meantime, the conversations with the boatman on the raft-ride across the styx.

What if our life really is just the dreamstate of, and free time during, our passage from options to oblivion?

Love,

~ Driz

~ by drizitche on March 20, 2009.