Remembering what is to come

There are things of tomorrow that I could tell you, things of splendor, of wonder, of joyful relief, if I could only recall them.

The sea rolls. It moves. It is incessant. It is seeking. It is perfectly unpredictable. It is recognizably unshaped. It knows not its next form. It understands completely that its waves will be.

I watch them, my fellow travelers. We come in many shapes and forms. Some of us are bipedal. Some are winged. Some trot on the ends of cords. Some sun on the rocks, flippers pointing like guideposts. Our senses flare. At the ocean’s edge, we stretch ourselves. Something about the juncture of sea, land, and salty air beckons us. We lose boundaries. We forget to think. We breathe.

The waves, oh how they roll. They swell, they soothe, they lash out in fury, they caress like butter spreading atop warm bread. Shifting, constantly. Pausing, interminably. Nameless. Yet somehow identifiable.

Turn your face to the distant horizon! Smell the saturated air of being! Feel the sun, wind, and sound against your closed eyes, your upturned brow, your yearning soul.

Forget to think. Sink into the simple undulation of awareness.

And still the expanse of sea shifts, humming in murmurs, pounding the shoreline with emphatic phrasing. It is calling in a language you instinctively understand.

Notice – how people move on dry land akin to the rolls of liquid that roil the border between standing and floating. The currents of intentionality buoy us. We bob. We set anchor. We lean into an invisible compass of pointless yet purposeful orientation that mysteriously manipulates and guides us, as if we were magnets pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled, pulled by some massive force of attraction, some unseen but constantly present lodestone, a reminder, a susurrus, a wordless whisper.

A remembrance of things to come.

We belong – the ocean knows it. We have always belonged – the tingle in our skin declares it. Hark! the breakers bellow. Release! the undulating tide admonishes. Reconnect! the unbounded essence of the sea, sand, and sky urge.

I am fastened to the future, which holds tight to the past, both balanced atop the most minuscule pin of a point I call the present. Somehow I stand tiptoe on this moment with you, with everything, each and all of us straining to extend ourselves, individually, from the tiniest touch with terra firma to the most fragile attachment with intangible etherea, collectively. There is a true lingua franca in our world, an actual bridging language of being; we can sense it. Awash in a daily plethora of dialects for living, we long for a common form of communication, a wordless reassurance that you, me, us, this – all of it – that it has coherence, that it has meaning, that it makes sense. And then we smell the salty sea, we lose focus on its heaving horizon, we close our eyes and we breathe, we inhale, we keep inhaling, we inhale like each gulp that fills our lungs is the first one, inhaled for the first time, we do all of us, without thinking, and we know, we understand, we feel comfort. We forget to remember to be.

The waves are us. When time looks and listens, it sees and hears how we moved together, not how any of us somersaulted, spun, sank, or spiraled aloft as solitary droplets. The surges, the swells, the rollers of today recede into the collective memory of tomorrow, not with regret, never with remorse, but with relaxed acquiescence, with humble acceptance. A myriad of ripples rejoice in their partnership with the breakers they form, all exquisitely formed curls of nature that spread out and over the shores of this present, and then this one, and the next one. And the next.

We are all bridges that the stream of time’s consciousness dares to cross. Feel the connection. Let the future flow through you. Let it be you.