-Emerson
Once each month, the whole lot of us spend a day together. Very often we spend the time doing some kind of work, a project for productive bonding. Slacker though I am, I've loved working with people towards a useful purpose we have chosen. Labor has a way of distilling our words and actions, so that most of the idle babble by which we hide ourselves is left behind. Our particular strengths and weaknesses are set in front of the whole, and there we are. A little more naked, perhaps than we like to be, and a degree more real. It's uncomfortable, and we usually have self-defending attitudes to dispose of before much can be accomplished with the task at hand or with the people by our side. We can grow by sharing work.
And we can grow by sharing fun and leisure. So this November, in lieu of ripping out walls or building fences, we crossed a bridge and headed for Fort de Soto to spend the day on the beach. Fueled by fast Caribbean food and driven by Gio and his vanly van, the nine of us spilled out onto the sand, some with books, one with a football (is this becoming a trend?), into an unflinching glory quietly spread out over land and water, between earth and sky. We had spent plenty of days tinkering away with our own attempts to create and to craft; now it was time to step into Dad's workshop and see how a pro does it, see the breadth of creative work that is our inheritance. I can't find any way of setting letters next to each other on paper or manipulating tongue and teeth and vocal chords to communicate what the sand says as it reshapes itself beneath and between us, or what the tide is teaching as it expands and recedes on the cusp of dry ground. Every clever word that comes to mind bows out of the conversation because of the molten waves of color pouring out of the horizon. It was good.
Like tides on a crescent sea-beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in-
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod,-
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.
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