I’ve spent a bit of time at the meeting place of sea and land. I’ve looked at it, photographed it, stood in it, dived through it, got to know it pretty well.1
Here’s an imagined conversation between (in my presumption) the poet-philosopher-theologian John O’Donohue (JO’D) and me (AK), using quotes from his wonderful book Divine Beauty and my book Islands.
—
AK: During a sideways jolt in my life, a run in with burnout and anxiety, a friend and I went north to the Bay of Islands, and visited Marsden Cross, Oihi Bay.
On that wet, stormy day, I felt a sense of pilgrimage, and experienced it as a thin place. An excited, perhaps hungry, at times uneasy embrace had occurred there in history between two cultures. An arrival on the beach, a welcome, a proclamation, a renegotiating of the paradigm.
As I stood there in the angular rain, I watched the waves curling over onto the shore, foaming up the sand and pebble, advance, diminish, advance, diminish. The meeting of land and sea. The outline of the map describing that point of meeting. A line described in white.
I had a deep empathy for it, and perhaps I and it were sharing in a bigger story that encompassed all. Anyway, that turbulent place of meeting, the land and water together being the elements of coastline, was a treasured and mysterious metaphor for what was going on inside me. Perhaps I could find communion and a paradoxical kind of stillness there.2
—
JO’D: The wild divinity of the ocean infuses the shore with ancient sound. Who can tell what secrets she searches from the shoreline? What news she whispers to the shore in the gossip of urgent wavelets? This is a primal conversation. The place where absolute change rushes against still permanence, where the urgency of Becoming confronts the stillness of Being, where restless desire meets the silence and serenity of stone. Beyond human seeing and knowing, the meeting of ocean and shoreline must be one of the places where the earth breaks through to word.3
—
AK: The land shapes the water, diverts it, dictates the dynamic and path of its flow, draws up breakers, provides the surface on which it turns white. Allowing it to encroach so far but no further for now, allowing it to fill empty places. But then again, the water shapes the land. The water is the land’s negative space, it defines the land’s shape. And over time, regardless of how hard the land is, the water will etch it, carve it, smooth it off, reduce it. I sense there’s beauty in that.4
—
JO’D: When the tide goes out, the seashore is exposed, its eroded stone pockmarked and chewed by tide. Between tides this line of fragmented shore seems vulnerable as though exposed in an arrested posture from which it cannot stir. It is reminiscent of edge-lines in your life where fluency abandons you. In such times of emotional devastation, the woundedness and fragmentation stand out, naked and exposed. The natural ease of rhythm seizes up. Each gesture, thought and action has to be deliberately willed. Everything becomes extremely difficult. What you would have accomplished without the slightest thought now becomes an action that seems impossible. Yet hope whispers that the tide always returns. Transfiguration graces you gradually. You stood exposed and atrophied, unable to move in the grip of pain; even the ground was naked and broken beneath you. Now gradually fluency returns. You recover your spontaneity and new buoyancy raises you up and your heart is again relieved and glad as when the ocean returns along the shoreline and everything becomes subsumed in the play and dance of young waves.5
—
AK:
sea noise
white foam salt
water overlaps
my tideline6
—
JO’D:
May the fluency of the ocean be yours…7
—
Amen.
Divine Beauty (which I thoroughly recommend as one of the finest books I’ve ever read – published in the USA as Beauty: The Invisible Embrace) can be purchased here.
Islands, can be purchased here.
Notes
1. Killick, Andrew, Islands, Shadow Press, 2019. p56.
2. Ibid. pp48-49.
3. O’Donohue, John, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, Bantam, 2004. p126.
4. Killick. p49.
5. O’Donohue. pp126-127.
6. Killick. ‘fig. 35’, p58.
7. O’Donohue, ‘Beannacht’, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, Doubleday, 2008. Retrieved from onbeing.org/poetry/beannacht/.
The featured image for this post is a detail of fig. 35 from the Islands series.
The Sacrament of Breathing 