Back With My Ocean Again

Copyright © 2017

by Ralph F. Couey

A month into the new contract assignment and things are beginning to sort themselves out. There's always differences, but the change from broiling Arizona to temperate California was a welcome one.  At least until this past two weeks.

I've always had tender feelings towards the massive body of water that is the Pacific Ocean.  I spent ten years criss-crossing it's surface while in the Navy, but the feeling goes beyond mere familiarity.  The Pacific has a realm of beauty that, in my mind, far surpasses its iron-gray eastern counterpart.  Most of its area encompasses the warmth of the tropics, from the gentility of Tahiti to the harsh heat of the Solomon Islands. For the most part these are places of great beauty, and what we generally think of as idyllic.  Along the west coast of the U.S., the interplay of golden sunlight, deep blue waters and the tawny sand and green hills beyond creates a pallet that eases the eye and soothes the soul.

Whenever we visit California, I make it a point of going to the beach and watching the sunset.  As an experience, it recalls those lonely evenings at sea when I would stand on deck with a lump in my throat missing my family.  Hawaii has beautiful sunsets, but the colors are stronger, bold reds and oranges, breathtaking in their own way.  But California's colors are gentler, tending more towards calming pastels.  It is that softer tone that touches me so deeply.



To see the Pacific touches the poet within.  I feel a peace I just don't get anywhere else.  Everyone has such a place, somewhere the harshness of life is somehow held at bay and a space of healing opens up.  It may not be a specific place, but perhaps wherever we happen to be with the one person who means the world to us.

We sometimes forget that in the challenge of maintaining our physical health, that our spirit at times requires attention as well.  It is important to know that because a sick or broken spirit can leave the body also sick and broken.  Thee are more than a few people who after a severe emotional trauma have passed from this life, leaving "broken heart" as the sole cause of death.  But there are just as many of those who suffered from grievous health problems who willed themselves back to health on the strength of an unbreakable spirit.

We seek those places because we need to be healed.  It is there that a painful past can be reconciled; where a light can illuminate a dark, unknowable future. Standing on that beach, watching the sun slide into the horizon, I found that space.  I am emerging from a period of time where I had lost my sense of purpose, and sometimes, worth.  It has been a challenge to find myself in this new paradigm of retirement.  In a sense, I've been stumbling around in the dark.  But as my eyes fell once again on the crenelated waters of my ocean stretching to the horizon, somehow things became better.  And I realized that perhaps this new life is doable after all.