My love affair with bodies of water is well-documented. I was swimming before I was walking, spent every summer in either our pond, a neighbor's pool or frolicking (yes frolicking) in Lake Erie at our family's summer house. My summer memories are mainly on a boat or the dock at Bay Point and look something like this:
And this:
I have swam in our pond less than a month after there was ice on it (late March in Ohio is still pretty damn cold!) and one of my favorite places in the world is in a warm tub with a good book. My affair went so far as to dictate my job search out of grad school. The moment a job would post I wouldGoogleMap the location and if it was more than an hour away from either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean I would mark it off my list. Looking back it probably wasn't the best or most responsible technique, but hey, it did get me toLMU where this was my backyard and only a five minute drive away:
So now for the first time in four years, I'm landlocked. Santa Clara is nestled between two mountain ranges. (To be fair, the natives call them the "foothills," but trust me, they are mountains, at least to this Ohioan who considers any change in elevation to be a serious deal.)
At first it was a little suffocating to not be able to see the ocean. I have always identified with water, with its fluidity, with its ability to conform and shape to what it was given. I would always choose the ocean when asked for a metaphor about myself in one of the hundreds of icebreakers I've done in my life. The comparisons to not only who I was, but also who I wanted to be seemed to be endless.
The ocean was both consistent and spontaneous. You could set your watch to the tides, but in the same breath those tides were influenced by such far-away constituents as the moon! The connectedness of the ocean was also appealing to me. Staring at the ocean or standing with my feet in it often made me wonder about what else that droplet of water or grain of sand that was now settling onto my big toe had touched in its lifetime. Had it skimmed the outside of a fish? A cruise ship? Been at the bottom of the sea where it have never seen the light of day? Been on the shoreline of Indonesia?Bora Bora? Japan? South Africa? Who else had experienced the same thing I had, only on a different continent or time zone?
I liked the volatility of the ocean. I liked that an earthquake thousands of miles away was able to influence the swells that I saw outside my back door. I liked the constant movement and shifting that the ocean offered. That same droplet of water was was just on my big toe will never again be in that same spot again in its lifetime. The transitional nature was alluring to me and continued to be throughout my time atLMU.
Reflecting back (as a good Jesuit educator should), this fascination seemed to make sense. I was in a time of huge transition by moving 3,000 miles away to a place where I knew not a soul to a city that was thousands of times bigger and a world away from what I had always known. However, there was something else that was very intoxicating about the ocean.
The ocean bends and molds itself to its surroundings. Sure it can slowly and painstakingly wear down rocks or landforms, but in the short-term, small-scale, the ocean bends to you. You steer a boat into the ocean and it moves out of your way and leaves a wake behind you. You step into the ocean and the water moves out of the way of your form and then instantly returns to support you. In many ways, I was the ocean. I let people drive over me and leave me in their wake. I got out of people's way and then instantly returned to support them, somehow drawn to their essence in my proverbial ocean.
My reflection on the ocean brings me to the new allureness of the mountains that surround me. Santa Clara is nestled between two mountain ranges so any way you look, you see them and almost feel cradled by their height and stability. Any time I go outside and drive anywhere, my breath catches the same way that it used to when I saw the ocean. To be consistently impressed by nature says something and makes me think about the qualities of the mountains that now surround me:
Mountains are steady. Constant. Enduring. Not-to-be-messed-with. The only real way to change a mountain is with a whole lot of explosives and a lot of determination. However, tiny streams of water that start at the top can carve down the mountain and change the face of it forever, while still never impacting the core of who and what the mountain is.
My fascination with mountains really kicked off with my AB trip to Appalachia. Like all AB trips, this one had a deep impact on me, especially when it came to environmentalism and particularly mountain conservation, the details of which I will save for another post. One of my favorite parts of the trip was where we stayed. The location of our accommodations was at a Catholic Worker farm and it was "back in the holler." The holler was the Appalachian way of describing the valley of two ridges where many Appalachians lived. The space was quiet and calming and supportive.
You just felt safe when you were in the holler and the more that I think about my current environment I think that's what I'm feeling. The thing that I like about mountains is that the core of who they are will always remain the same, but the outside changes with the season and with the environment even if these are sometimes not in line with one another. During my internship in Pomona, CA it would be between 90-115 degrees every day, but the local mountain would still have a snow-covered peak. Steady, consistent, but can still surprise you.
I'm in a place in my life where I want to be more of a mountain than an ocean. I don't want to have to conform to everything that gets put in my path, but still be able to be impacted by circumstances around me. I want to be able to stay true to who I am, but still be able to let the proverbial rivers of life work their way into my life. I want to be strong. Steady. Unwavering. Supportive. Calm. Safe for others.
And I think I can be that here. It's a good feeling.
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