"After a day as good as today, how do you go back to the same life as yesterday?"
Two days after the wedding, it was my last day in Florida. I was sunburnt and sweaty and sore from a morning jog on the beach. I'd checked out of the hotel but still had hours to kill before my flight. So, feeling somewhat homeless, I slathered on the sunscreen, purchased a half-day beach umbrella rental, and tried to keep as much of my body as possible submerged under sea level.
The Gulf of Mexico was a new body of water to me. This is significant if you know me, because I grew up always around water. I am home when I am near the water. And it's so unlike any other water in my memory. It's so calm. The waves break on Sand Key at about knee level, and after that you're left with soft little ripples that barely lift you, but just bend you and pull you around like a long blade of sea grass. And it's warm. It's so warm. I've taken chillier baths. At first, in the hot sticky Florida atmosphere, it's almost not a relief to step into the water. The waves seem hot as they break against your body. Which is just all the more reason to wade in up to your chin and just hang out and watch the pelicans glide by at nose-level. I decided on this trip that pelicans are my new favorite things ever. They are at once completely ridiculous animals but also beautifully designed and graceful.
So it was in this setting that I had A Moment. Or two or three. A series maybe, or possibly just one extended experience. It's hard to tell. I'll jump to the end because I don't know how else to explain it all, but I wound up simultaneously laughing and crying. Not in a I-laughed-so-hard-I-cried kind of way, or I-laughed-to-hide-my-tears kind of way. But in an enormous outpouring of the depths of my soul kind of way. Like emptying my lungs to take in my first ever real breath of air. It was difficult to do, standing in the Gulf sobbing while trying to conceal my laughter. But I can't even describe how good it felt.
And I don't know why I felt this way. It came out of nowhere, like the twister that took Dorothy to Oz. Maybe there was a bump on the head involved, but so what if it makes the world take on more color?
So why? I thought. What is this? Why here? Why now? What is this sense of catharsis coming over me? I wasn't looking for one. And I don't think it was just one thing. It was everything coming together at once. Wringing out my insides and letting me dry in the sun.
I think it was A___'s wedding, for one. Giving in, after 26 years, to the idea that, even all grown up, you can never lose the connection to where you came from. For all the good and all the bad that comes with that. That people can reconnect. That we all find our way back to our roots in our own way, and that's okay. That's good. No need to keep running. Stop running. Let the water carry you where you belong.
I think it was the realization that I can stand on my own. I've traveled alone before, but I've never vacationed alone. I've never decided to find the way all on my own, to be okay being the only single on the beach, okay with my books and my magazines. To enjoy being with myself. I've recently made a number of decisions like this. And I am so proud of myself. I never took the time to be proud of myself until now.
And, maybe most importantly, I found God. Or rather, He found me. I can't explain this bawling, guffawing changing of my soul because it's not because of anything I did. It, like all the small amazing things that have happened in my life recently, are just little evidences of His grace. I was so stubborn for so long. And then He began showing me how to open my eyes. And He turned my heart. And maybe, just maybe, standing there in the Gulf under a huge blue sky was the culmination of it. Maybe that was a kind of baptism for me. Maybe.
So how was I supposed to go back to normal life after experiencing a quiet little life-altering spiritual awakening that day? Not easily, I can tell you that. But this here, this writing about it? It helps.
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