Sea wandering

This morning I awoke, read a bit and hit that pavement that curves all around J-bay. The hilly pavement led me astray to the sanded shore. As I walked up over a hill I sat, cradled in the sand watching a storm move on and another move in. The gray colors in the sky blended into one another overtaking the blue hues. With the billows beckoning to the sea, to mirror it’s heaviness.

I sat there, with the crisp chilled wind blowing across my face, burning my bare legs. I sat there on the shore, so far from home, where the water meets. Questions overflowed my heart and it was as if I looked to the sea for my answers. Set after set the waves echoed an answer to my heart; there is adventure ringing true in the depths of this world. Those small waves were crashing on the beach break, but they were just the aftermath from the severe and solid waves of massiveness that were playing beyond my eyesight in the sea’s hub.

Sometimes the silence is the most crowded place, when my thoughts begin to outgrow themselves and my dreams begin to outlive the realm of reality. So I found myself on this beach, 4 months into this adventure, toes in shoes and arms in sleeves, no sun to see but salt to smell. I found myself accepting this opportunity, exactly as it has come, exactly as it has woven itself into my life. I’m finding I’m not the same girl here that I was at home, not with people who know me – falling into days where it seems like I have nothing and no one. But honestly, it feels like falling into freedom.

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive” Am I falling back on some form of inner madness? A madness that in reality keeps me sane and helps me move, helps me dance in the discomfort of formality of a society I have never longed to be a part of? A madness that is saving, because it really is part of the package. When you step out of your front door, and you leave security and you leave all you’ve ever known, even yourself, you have to have your feet steady on something in order to survive.

If you haven’t ventured, if you haven’t seriously stepped into that realm of unknown, into a land where you had to leave yourself and everything you once thought to be true than you, my friend, have no idea of what I am talking about. Because with this madness, when looking to the sea for answers, you don’t know the pain that comes with it. Unfortunately, you don’t know the gain either.

The sea beckons us, the unrevealed and the unfound, the adventure and danger, it beckons to certain souls. Igniting them with a flame that arouses a wanderlust that can only be fulfilled by those waves that are unseen to the people who stay on their own shores. It is those uncharted waves, those that are unrealistic, that can kill you, the ones you find in the stomach of the sea – It is those that keep the flame of the wandering vagabond satisfied.