On the last day of August, with school starting this week for many of us, it’s a good time to reflect on some summer lessons from the sea. I’m from the Ocean State, Rhode Island, with its miles of sandy beaches. I love going to the beach to swim, sun, and walk on the tide’s edge. But also I like just sitting and looking out over the water. The horizon line never fails to fill me with a sense of wonder, singing as it does of life’s far and unknown borders.
People say of difficult situations, It wasn’t a day at the beach. But life is like a day at the beach. Some days, life is great. The sun is shining and the water sparkles like so many diamonds. There are no clouds, the waves are perfect and you ride them in—all the way to the shore. Life is good.
And then there are those other days at the beach when life is a monster wave that picks you up and slams you down, churning you like so much wet laundry in the spin cycle, leaving you with a mouth full of salt water, or, like this past weekend, worse. The ferocious riptides on the East Coast this week, courtesy of Hurricanes Danielle and Earl, dragged many out to sea. At Narragansett Beach this past weekend, the air was cut with the sound of rescue sirens, en route to help those caught in a rip’s current.
When life’s difficulties and trials drag you out like a riptide, all you can do is go with the flow. Remember not to swim against the current. Don’t fight it. Stay calm. Have faith. By swimming parallel to the shore, you will eventually find the opening that leads you back to the beach. On days like that, it’s important to surrender, with all the grace that that misunderstood verb implies, and to know that the tide that goes out always comes back in. The ceaseless tides tell us that more important than any one day is the accumulation of many days and small acts—acts of loving kindness, acts of generosity, acts that require impossible leaps of faith. All these add up to a life.
Water’s most remarkable quality is its ability to be simultaneously life giving and erosive. Drop by drop, very gently and persistently, water will wear down the biggest stone. It can take down a mountain. After many years, I’ve come to know that persistence trumps intelligence and talent every time. Most people just don’t hang in there long enough.
The horizon line divides the world into two parts—sky and ocean. That distant but ever-present, reassuring line marks the place where earth and heaven connect, where people come together in all their vulnerability and mystery. It’s a cosmic timeline, marking the brief moment of our own lives, as well as the lifetimes of those who lived before us, and those still to come. As summer comes to a bittersweet end, it’s good to sit on a beach and remember that you have a place in eternity.
Photo: Waves Crashing in RI (cc): Flickr / Laram77
About judith.dupre
Judith Dupré expresses her passion for art, language and God in her work as an author, curator, and teacher. She is the author of many internationally best selling books that have been translated into ten languages. As a curator, she organizes exhibitions that emphasize the act of seeing, really seeing, the world as it is. She lectures widely on ways to nurture individual and collective creativity—in the arts, sciences, and religion.
An important function of her books is to create joy and inspire curiosity. Each book is designed to create a connection with the topic for those who hold them in their hands: Skyscrapers is 18 inches high; Bridges, opened, is three feet across; Churches has a split binding that opens like a church’s center doors; and Monuments’ sculpted cover evokes carved stone and the tactile experience of running one’s fingertips over a memorial.
As one critic wrote, she writes nonfiction “with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style.”
Churches steered her onto a new road in her own faith journey, bringing her to Yale Divinity School where she is exploring the social and ethical implications of public art and architecture, and how their design can uphold the human spirit. Her newest book, Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art & Life (Random House, Nov. 2010) shows how the life of the Virgin Mary illuminates our contemporary concerns as friends, lovers, and parents.
Her dream is to create a residency program where artists, scientists, and mystics can work in a place of serenity and great physical beauty. Until that dream becomes a reality, she rejoices in the fact that she has created such a community in the virtual world.
Judith welcomes your comments and collaboration!
The ocean and you very much entwine, Judith, and you convey it to me with your words. Thank you.
Thanks, Ed! I'm glad the story moved you.