One Morning

Some mornings when I wander down to the beach, the beauty is staggering. Today the sky's deep morning blues were stitched with coal grey clouds. The blues turned to lavender and stretches of pink, all of it a preamble to the sun which began to rise over the quiet waters.

The usual suspects were all there: the two gulls perched together on one rock. The egrets that dipped their beaks into the low waters and craggy rocks in search of breakfast, each movement elegant. The five ducks that paddled everywhere together.

The sky changed again and the morning woke.

Grit

The last time Diana Nyad tried to swim from Cuba to Florida I thought `Enough!' Everything about it was far too punishing, too risky and seemingly impossible.

And then yesterday, the news came that she finished the swim at 64. On her fifth try, she did it.

One hundred and ten miles from Havana to the Keys through cross currents and waters that dropped at night to dangerously low temperatures. She had to out-fox tides and sharks, exhaustion and a particularly nasty box jellyfish.

It took years and ingenuity, relentless drive, an abidingly loyal team and a grit I admire more than anything else. Each time she shook her head NO at those of us who thought, `Impossible' and put on her suit and got back in.

Perhaps that's one thing I love best about living, how other people's quests carry us and remind us, we have to get back in too. We have to head toward whatever it is we are after.

Why? I wondered back when she first tried it and, particularly, the time before this one. But I get it now.

Why put a rover on Mars? Why run a marathon or stare down a blank page or put that first brush to canvas? Why plant rows and rows of seeds or buy that old car for the chance of having a run at rehabbing that old engine?

Because the long  night in the cold tossed seas is now in the distance and the outline of the shore is just ahead, right there.

                                                 ~                                          ~

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/sports/nyad-completes-cuba-to-florida-swim.html?hp&_r=0

http://www.diananyad.com/

The poet Seamus Heaney died this week. NPR ran an old interview and Heaney spoke about the home he grew up in as a child. He described how the railroad tracks ran by his house and the telegraph wires too. He and his friends used to watch as the raindrops gathered on the wires and in the magical way of childhood they imagined other possibilities. 

In the poem "The Railway Children," Heaney wrote, "We thought words traveled the wires/in the shiny pouches of raindrops/Each one seeded full with the light/Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves/So infinitesimally scaled/We could stream through the eye of a needle."

On a morning walk today, I stopped to watch the raindrops gather on the wild beach roses, the skinny green stalks and pale leaves. And as a misty rain continued to fall on this Labor Day picnic day, I had to smile. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98772112