The Warm Embrace: Coming Back

I’ve just returned home from a two week vacation at the beach—my favorite beach. Sugary sand, warm bay water, six foot swells that make for impeccable body-surfing, long stretch of uninterrupted shore. The horizon surrounds. On our last day, we decided leaving the beach must be put off for as long as possible. We sent the men off for pizza and beer for us and lemonade for the kids. We made a circle of our beach chairs and took it all in deep into the waning evening. The sun setting in the east, the full moon rising opposite. There was perfect balance. The moon at sunset.

It was a lovely vacation. We had almost perfect weather. Only one fully rainy day and one passing thunderstorm on another. Two weeks is a long time for a vacation and even though I am always sad to leave the beach, it’s good to get home. We always vacation in the first two weeks of August and I can’t help but feel that the end of our beach trip marks the end of summer, its winding down. I always get energized for creative projects at this time of year. And I’m never sad to see summer pass. I grew up at the ocean and summers away from it make me feel untethered; I’m never sure exactly what to do with myself when the hot weather invades because the only place that feels natural is the beach, which is hours from where I live. On my evening walks the past few days, I noted the creeping-in of night. The heat has abated some (although it might come rushing back for one last hurrah). Vacation was a stepping away from work and now, back at home with the vacation laundry done, I am experiencing a renewal and a return. A much-welcome return.

Sometimes you have to go away to want to come back.

My work is calling again—vociferously. The clamor is invigorating. Like those ocean waves crashing, I never tire of the sound. It inspires action and movement and progress. Largeness, expansiveness. But after the hot lethargy of summer, I require a slow reentry. My body and mind feel more like the sound the ocean makes as it flows over the small rocks at the shore. Have you heard that sound? It is like the sound of a slow-moving brook. Not crashing, not white water. It is low melody. Right now, I want to listen carefully and closely, pick up my pen and write slowly and mindfully. Wait for the momentum—the rolling swiftness of the creativity of autumn.

My sister and I took the kids on a little excursion to a place called Elephant Rock—a massive hunk of granite at the mouth of a harbor that opens into the wide ocean. We climbed to the top and overlooked the beach sprawling across the mouth the the harbor one way and the open ocean to our right. We clambered down and walked the rocky shore that stretches westward. We happened upon some slabs of concrete rising out of the sand, some faced with red brick, clearly man-made and man-placed. These, my sister and I mused, must be ruins from The Great Hurricane that swept through in 1938, decimating the coast of Buzzards Bay. The silence of the concrete gave me pause, especially just having come down off the enormity of that rock, taking in the vastness of the ocean. The contrast of the grand, large wide-open crashing water and the quiet stories of the slabs of concrete. Move slowly, those slabs whispered. Be quiet and listen closely, that water over the small rocks on the shore sang softly.

I recalled something I wrote some years ago, in an earlier incarnation of after-vacation creativity:

Swimming in warm water as the sun goes down, sand pipers pecking the shore, dune grass yellow-green flowing waves in the breeze, brilliant blue hydrangeas like soft jewels, footprints in the sand hinting their silent stories, sand-softened beach glass, riptides and undertows, seagulls fighting over discarded leftovers late in the day, sand arranged in intricate random patterns on ankles and toes like bridal henna, a warm shower after a day on the beach—seaweed and sand stuck to the white skin under your bathing suit.

These are the things to count on.

Right now as summer uncoils into the heap of autumn, it’s about the slow movement back into the words.

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