"How refreshing, the whinny of a packhorse unloaded of everything!" - Zen Saying
The summer I moved to the Charleston coast there was an earthquake and a hurricane...a foreshadowing of the shaking up of my life and the moving of the ground under my feet. The August 23 earthquake was centered in Virginia, but I felt the eerie pulse of the earth on Folly as I sat on my sofa in a moment of escape from the August heat. The oddest little shake and some things fall apart. Irene, blowing offshore on August 26, damaged the west end of the island and caused the County Park to be closed for the next year. One storm offshore and an entire year was rearranged. Bad enough that the Charleston jetties steal sand daily from the island, but the numbered and named storms do the same regularly and demand respect. None given. Just build bigger and build closer and pretend the sea and sky are not angry. When the ground shakes under you and the wind blows you about, how is you come to believe something new...that the brutal rearrangement of the furniture of your life is a good thing, an update, a movement forward, growth...when it feels like the best part of you was shaken loose and blown to sea? Believe. Something. New.
"Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen. Repent just means to change direction — and NOT to be said by someone who is waggling their forefinger at you. Repentance is a blessing. Pick a new direction, one you wouldn’t mind ending up at, and aim for that. Shoot the moon." -Anne Lamott
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