This came out of a weekend writing workshop at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology last month, taught by Sarah Rabkin and Chuck Atkinson. Thank you, Peggy, for instigating that fun! I am fascinated by the idea of ebb tide. Joan Anderson writes beautifully of it in A Year By the Sea. I think the next time I am at the beach I will sit quietly through the tidal transition and, for just a bit, forget to breathe.
An infinite space of quietness
right there in that tiny, little place.
As the breath flows out of my body
I hear and follow the sound
as far as it, or I, can go.
as far as it, or I, can go.
Until I feel my belly contract with the pushing,
just the smallest bit more.
And it's there.
That transparent window of -
What is it? Time? Space?
where nothing is happening.
The ebb tide of breathing,
yet to turn around.
Just a whisper of a moment
before that automated reflex to breathe kicks in.
The very beginning of some vague need that will soon be air hunger.
The window through which, if one were going to die, they would.
That's where it will happen, isn't it?
Someday I'll come to the edge of that last exhale
and in the skipped heartbeat of time before the next inhale
I will cross an altogether different edge
into that infinite space of quietness.
And while, at one time, that thought bore horror -
the thought of dying;
of not being -
it's just not the case anymore.
No.
When it comes I think it will be
the most unimaginably exhilarating slipping-through-the-crack
into the next thing.
The polar opposite of not being.
Being-er.
And I am so, so curious.
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