Michael Scott Hand

The tide raises us like boats and we are held up by the surface of the water, buoyed up beneath the majesty of the night sky and all its lights.

There, the boats are above everything and the moonlight shimmers on their sails. And the water shows the reflection of the endless darkness and turns it to light that sweeps and shimmers across the waves.

And the moon and the stars loom so large and so close and the waves roll away to the star-lit horizon such that we might imagine that we could ride them away into the sky.

This is the ocean and the night and the tide that raises us. This is the moon and the stars that light our way. This is the swelling of the ocean before it ebbs away.

Sunlight dawns on weary sails, no longer shining in the moonlight. Boats shift and rock upon the morning water, no longer raised up against the sky.

A gull caws and a rope is thrown. A mop slides across the deck. An anchor is hauled and the wind whips through the sails, filling them with hope.

The sky is blue and filled with wispy clouds that drift like fleeting memories. The captain stands at the bow and watches the sun rise.

The sunlight spreads across the water.

I… sometimes struggle to find the words, to describe the struggle that resides within me. I push back with my psyche against the darkness and a light radiates from somewhere within that is not like any other light.

And in the light we see the cracks and scars that mark us (scars both literal and more ambiguous), we see the lines of worry around our eyes; lines that mark our love.

For if you have loved you have worried and if you have been afraid than you have hoped. And so that light that shines and betrays us to the world as broken, rebuilt, worried, afraid, hopeful also shows us to be beautiful.

Far more precious than ancient antiques, paint flaked and faded, chipped porcelain; we are living, breathing legacies of everything and everyone we’ve loved and our humanity, our fragility, those same feelings that make us ache are those same feelings that make us alive.

So bear your scars with pride and lift your chin. You do not need to hide the lines around your eyes or the pain within them. Embrace the wholeness of that which makes you feel weak, for that which we mistake as weakness is merely bravery and weariness. And accept that you can be–in fact, that you are–both broken and beautiful.

The thread passes through the head of the needle and then the needle passes through the weave of the thread; this is what it is to sew.

The tiller is dragged through the soil and then the seeds are scattered across the field; this is what it is to sow.

The writer threads words into sentences and plants the seeds of ideas–and so, both sews and sows.

The man stands before the mountain that mocked the boy.

The mountain has not changed–but the boy has.

There’s grey in his hair now; like the cold, far-off glinting of stars.

There is a certain weariness about the way he stands.

There is a certain determination in his dark eyes.

The boy once stood in this imaginary place.

This no-place except a place to see a mountain.

And the mountain mocked the boy. And the mountain said:

“Can you climb the mountain?”

As though a mountain could talk.

In the years that have passed the boy/man has not moved an inch.

He stands in the same spot, he looks at the same mountain.

But it is different now: the mountain no longer mocks him.

In his youth the mountain brought him here.

Now the man brings the mountain to him.

The mountain is imaginary–he does not need to climb it.

If he wishes, he may make himself taller than the mountain and merely step over it.

And so the mountain does not ask:

“Can you climb the mountain?”

The boy has outgrown the question.

I do not try to catch my ideas, or else I find they slip through my fingers.

Like running water–like a wild stream–coursing downwards between the rocks. Churning and turning, leaves bob and tumble along the foaming surface and sand swirls beneath them.

These are my ideas: this wild stream, this ever-coursing. The movement of the water is chaotic, we cannot predict where each particle ends up and as the stream weaves back and forth between the rocks and the shore, as it bounces and bubbles and foams, it splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms, splits up and reforms.

One thousand times a second. Who knows, maybe more. The water mingles and mixes and so do my ideas run across and through one another, both the same ideas–the same stream–and different, ever-changing and ever-changed by their passage through this analogy.

Analogy, no less an allegory, no less a speaking of things hidden from view yet visible to the watcher of the stream who perceives his thoughts rushing downwards, ever-changing, ever-chaotic. And the He that is Me knows it is impossible to collect these ideas, even in a bucket.

For the water outside of the stream is nothing like the water within. The water outside is stagnant and separate. It contains, perhaps, a hint of the source, but nothing like the memory of being one with the stream. And so the idea, like the water, must be poured back.

I do not try to catch my ideas, I merely watch them and am aware of them and am aware of the sensation of gravity and momentum that propels them and me forward, down, weaving complex patterns between the rocks. I do not try to catch my ideas and pour them into glasses and say: look what I have imagined, taste the water of my dreams.

I merely watch the stream and am aware of it and, in turn, from that swirling, ever-downwards chaos, describe the thought-forms I see reflected on the surface. Is that the sun that shines through the trees or the illumination of my intellect?

There is no such thing as still water.