My friendships on Martha’s Vineyard are unlike anywhere else in my experience.  It is the shared leap across the water, the choosing to live surrounded by the sea, away from the ordinariness of the mainland that connects us like blood.  During this visit, each person that I have seen – old friends, acquaintances, close, distant – have had a quick and immediate velocity and heat, as if during my six years away, those relationships had been steeping, deepening their colors, reddening like the Aquinnah cliffs as the sea rubs away the layers, bringing out what lies beneath. I feel welcomed, held, savored, again and again.

From the moment I arrived on the island in 1992, I felt at home.  I can remember awakening the first morning that I slept in my little room at The Yard, looking out at a thrush perched at the top of a cypress tree waving in the morning ocean mist, feeling that I had landed on the planet for the first time.  I had been wandering and now I was home.

Pam, Chandrika and I are spending a week here with Jo-Ann and Derrill, the godparents of our daughters, and their son Jacob, our godson.  I feel wrapped in something holy and firm –  fine as sand and solid as stone, irresistible as the sea.  Island love.

To leave the island required me to make myself cold to it, to distance myself from it in a way that was painful and harsh.  I said we were sick of the ferry, the schedules, the mad rush to make the boat, the sameness of the roads, the incestuousness of a small community bound by the sea.  Six years later, I am finally letting the blood flow back into that amputated limb, the breath come back into my body.

I wonder where else have I done this kind of severing.  What else have I exiled, pushed away?  Am I doing that now with the home that we are selling?  Do I need to shut off feeling to make transition less painful?  I can learn something here:  a different way of moving through change – by opening my heart fully, letting the wind blow through my pores, loving what I am leaving even as I push into the next chapter.

As I write I can hear the waves beating the Aquinnah shore. This morning, the sea was high and wild, thick with seaweed and surge from the storm that blew through last night.  It is like the beating of my heart, connecting me to everything – the past the present, the unknowable future – to this single, precious moment.

The pregnancy of our young, very naive daughter has an astrological name:  quincunx.  Our astrologer of over twenty years describes a quincunx as something unexpected, out of our control, bringing about change.  That would be about right.  On this astrology site, I found this description of a quincunx:

A quincunx is often described as “being between a rock and a hard place.” Therefore, the quincunx is described as a “hard” aspect, meaning it brings challenge. And challenges eventually build a stronger character. Through your own inflexibility, the quincunx will teach you to either “bend” or “break.” Either way, you’ll learn. And whether you learn the easy way or the hard way is certainly up to you.

A quincunx is thought to be one of the most difficult aspects to work with because it will not allow for retreat. There’s no backing down when it comes to this aspect because you can’t just think your way out of it, you have to take action on those thoughts. The quincunx will challenge you to trust your own intuition. Intuition is a very big deal when it comes to quincunx’.

So the choice with this is to bend or break.  I am bending.  I have no intention of breaking.  But this bending is a form of contortion at a time when I am feeling a bit stiff. Maybe parents’ hopes and dreams are always like that – a stiffening against the out-of-control, the unwanted.

My hope is that this current quincunx will break me open into spaciousness and love like this quote from Alice Walker:

Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts.  I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count.  But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger.  In fact, I was saying to my therapist not long ago, “You know, my heart by now feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase falls open.  It feels like that.”  Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it.  And that’s the way I’m used to my heart feeling.  The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it.

Alice Walker, Shambhala Sun, January 1997

Go Deeper

by Chris McCombs

Go deeper

Past thought
Into silence
Past silence
Into stillness

Deeper still
Past stillness
Into the Heart

Now
Let the Love
Consume
Whatever is left of you