Reflections of the Sea Soul

At one point I skipped across an alien surface of flat, grey rocks, an ancient lunar landscape, already mildly transported.


music
toy


sea
shawl


gull
call


in


Waves skinned the rock below me, burst off the wall of rock, crashed and gulped through crevices and under layers. At my feet I felt the play of water and rock – soft, solid, soft, solid – the zen pond of fluidity and hard matter.


wave
rock

         let’s
play, skip, walk


Looking out over the Firth, the seascape was divided. On my left, an expanse of light, the sun burning through a thin veil of cloud; on my right, dark clouds, dark water, the long limb of Arran, cloaked, mysterious, dark.


yin of sparkle                  yang of deep dull grey


Over me a feeling rolls, the feeling I want my body to dissolve like salt in the water, my consciousness to expand, merge with the sea. A loss of self-consciousness, identity united. Finding myself wholly in a body of water, part light, part dark. More of the oneness. More of me in the other than I can possibly be alone.


sea being

sea breathes

sea

being sea

breathes sea


Arran, hidden. Lifeforce, hidden.


              long
 (lazy island leg)
        
       long
 (lazy island leg)


And then, an overpowering expression of my father in me, my father six years dead, and beneath that, the sense that I am uniting with the child I was. All the sensations of childhood holidays by the coast flooding me, that little boy, that precious time in my life, released, let loose, capturing my consciousness, filling my chest; and the movements and mannerisms of my father, in my body, facial expressions, melodic vocal nuances, overwhelming me. This double identity, this union. One.


swallows swim my bloodstream


I wonder if some genetic quirk has been fully activated by the limitless expanse of sea, and if it has, then perhaps buried in that genetic code is the essence of who I am, who I am in my father, the Father, a union of souls within the infinite expression of the One.


   sh
sh ore sh
   sh


Also, an integration of Self – my senses then are my senses now. Parts of me from different time frames coming together harmoniously. A profound temporal alignment. In the distance, on the horizon, Ailsa Craig, symbol of self, faintly outlined in the mist.


man with flock of
starlings on his head


Finally, I return to the bench where my sister sits with her husband. My mother calls my sister’s phone. She wants to know if she should buy a table for her bedroom. She’d like us to see it. We leave the sound of the seas and the smell of salt air and head back into town to look at tables, and, most likely, drink coffee.


Five Minute Snapshot

two crows pecking sand on the beach some distance from black dog, who spots them, begins the chase. boy in black hooded top runs from mother towards ice cream kiosk, called back, told to wait. another boy bouncing ball, finds amusement in overflowing swing park, ball dribbles, abandoned, into wire fence. child cyclist claims to have cycled 15 miles that day. low plane bends over beach, lands in airfield behind the town, all heads on prom look up.

The Dream of Ailsa Craig as a Concrete Poem

Ailsa Craig is a volcanic plug in the Firth of Clyde, off the Ayrshire coast where I holidayed in Girvan as a child. It's a beautiful green/grey rock which sometimes wears a hat, sometimes wears a skirt. For a while now I've been dreaming of Ailsa, not as memory, but in a more mysterious, perhaps symbolic, perhaps even revelatory way. It occured to me that She is a natural object of contemplation, whose beauty appeals to the human gaze and naturally touches the human heart. So perhaps, I thought, the dreams are speaking to that part of me which is contemplative; so the rock becomes a symbol of the Self immersed in awareness of Itself, a symbol of the meditative state. Seems plausible. Often the dreams involve images of multiple Ailsas arranged in hilly, rocky clumps along the horizon; often they are shadowed, dark, misty. Perhaps then these multiple Ailsas are symbols of the divided Self, fragmetation, parts of my psyche which aren't wholly integrated. Do I sound like a Jungian? Well, maybe I am.

The rock is of course a huge letter in the middle of the sea - a glorious 'e' surrounded by wind & waves. She tells tales of an ancient past in her curling outline and deep rooted plug. And an 'e' is of course wholly, logically geological. To me at least. In my dreams, where language is picture and picture is language. Dreams as concrete poetry!