Shabbat. I pull on a hoodie and tie my tennis shoes, pop out the door and head for the water front.
Down to the boardwalk, across several docks, the ocean and the plaintive call of seagulls calling to me to look out upon the open water, out over the rocky jetty on the other side where the water is dark gray green, sullen and deep. The water seems to have a soul. It cries to me, touching a torrent of tears in my heart. Tears for things I do not even understand. I feel down to the very bottom, wherever that is.
Is it 20 feet deep here? I feel myself pulled as if by a supernatural force—pulled towards the depths, desiring to be there and yet my brain tells me that I can’t breathe down there. What is it about deep water that calls to my soul? My thoughts play before me as an old tape unreels before my mind. I am standing on another dock’ alongside the lock in Seattle where giant boats pass into a harbor. I am four years old. Drippy rain, damp slippery wood, the salty smell of seaweed, barnacles encrusting rocks and metal, slime and rotting fish, the suffocating smell of motor exhaust billowing from behind immense gray ships—I look down at the gushing water over the edge of the boardwalk where I am standing not ten inches away. I tremble as it pulls me. I feel I am falling and I envision myself pulled inside its depths, down down in to the cold murky silence. I close my mouth against a silent scream. My mother notices my panic and takes my hand. She leads me to where my father stands by a guard rail watching the giant vessels pass through the canal. We watch as immense concrete doors mechanically open while the water drops 50 feet in less than a minute, or surges up at the same rate when the doors close. Some man up in a tower is pushing a magic button to a machine that makes the world do strange things. Things a child could never imagine.
Birth trauma, that’s what the psychologists called it. But I wonder as more than fifty years have passed and water still has the same effect on me. Giant green breakers crash on the beach, turning to innocuous white foam in a matter of seconds. Unharnessed power shattered in an instant and revealed again in the next wave. Yet the shore has been commanded to hold back the tide. Oceans of furious water remain bound by their preordained limits. What if the Eternal slept? What if the Power that binds the Universe was released? We trust, sometimes we take for granted that we will always be here doing what we have always done. But we do not know tomorrow’s tide, not for a fact, we can only presume that tomorrow will be like today and continue ad infinitum. And we go on in our ways, racing against time to amass the material, experience the temporal—heaping up money, houses, and gadgets. Rarely do we take time to breathe and ponder, to open our minds. Do we ever stop along life’s boardwalk to peer into the murky depths and ask; who am I? Why am I?
