Shore to ocean

I’m not suggesting attitude cures illness, repairs losses, reverses bad luck, or magically improves a lousy hand. Circumstances remain circumstances. I’m talking about the smaller territory we actually govern - it’s between our ears, it’s in our loins, it’s in our ‘way we are in the world’ and we’re fools if we change that or consider we’re too old, too out of it to participate, to hope, to dream, to scheme, to listen, to learn, to borrow what we need from someone willing to provide, and to practice the reciprocity that demands, needs, wants and can’t live properly without:

What we notice, what meaning we assign,

and what we decide to do next.

Gratitude + attitude + words colliding

What we notice matters; what we do with it matters more; let’s go to ancient Persia, let’s talk poetry, let’s talk real life, right here, right now ...

Some words become measuring sticks for our lives - mine anyway.

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Gratitude can remember yesterday; attitude still has to get us through today.

This scene looks different at night, when it’s calm, when it’s stormy; we aren’t standing atop that cliff, and we’re not wading in the surf … we’re the ocean and the rocky shore, most of all when it’s a dark and stormy night …

I’ve had a couple of lines I’ve always attributed to Hafiz, wandering around in my head again in recent days, and the yearning to say them to someone who says them back to me is a quest that has not yet found the magic the words seem to require; or have I missed that, like ships passing in the night:

I can think of no greater devotion,
Than to be shore to your ocean.

Then there’s Robert Frost’s version, longer and more polished, but carrying much the same powerful image: of a shore holding its place while the ocean keeps arriving.

The heart can think of no devotion

Greater than being shore to ocean -

Holding the curve of one position,

Counting an endless repetition.

- Robert Frost

So, who borrowed from whom?

I’ve been thinking for many years; those were my accurate recollections of Daniel Ledinksy’s words in his translation of Hafiz’s work. In checking, CHAT-gee-pee-tee, it cautioned me not to mention Hafiz or Ledinsky for fear I’ll offend Frost fans. I’ve long liked lots of Frost-stuff, especially The Road Not Taken, though you gotta love Yogi Berra’s line better,

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it?”

I’ll leave that argument to people with more footnotes and less coffee.

What interests me is why certain words stay with us. I think that’s more than memorizing bumper stickers, like Gloria Steinem’s:

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,

That may be true, but fish need their tires pumped, their chain back on the sprocket, etc. But when I met her I didn’t bring up that trivial bit - because the session, the speech and the private chat and the hug she offered and I accepted - that bumper sticker is a smile and someone’s clever marketing; the experience was something else altogether - being in the audience, having a few private minutes and fear of crushing someone who hugs you tight but matching their action would be like crushing/injuring a very tall skinny shore-bird - that was magical; but it’s a memory.

I’m focused today more on the present and the immediate future. The longer-term things are going to be the steps-not-yet taken, after current tasks, deadlines and planned things get done … eventually, they get done, because I don’t give up on things that matter, or people who matter most of all. They know who they are.

They fit something we feel, have felt, and want to feel again.

I think it’s that precious moments and feelings remind us of someone, something said, a door opening, a problem softening/solving, or a laugh arriving precisely when needed. These are worth carrying always, whether that’s someone living or dead, or who might have written those words in the 13th century - because CHATG-think has Hafiz in the 14th century.

Details matter, sure. Feelings and connection to things, with or without some precise word-set or memory demanding to be heard. That’s fine, but those words and feelings - from ‘whenevA’ and whoever said them should never leave us. (How Hafiz or Frost might have advance-plagiarized words I hadn’t said or written yet remains a mystery I’m not fussed about solving.)

I’m increasingly unwilling to treat those things as ordinary.

Because they add value to my life every time I say them or write them and remember how I felt last night, or this morning.

I recommend making magic with words - it’s not about where you are, who you are with (well, it is, but that only matters to two )

because, in the whole world, nobody cares about you nearly as much

as you do.

That’s not selfish, or proud, or clear, or self-important - it’s all of those.

And that’s a huge thing at the centre of each of us - we are, in that respect, self-centred, selfish and greedy to taste more of what we’ve developed a taste for and a love of … to feel that way, and to be the shore to someone’s ocean,

and vicey-versey.

Refer a friend