I’m held in a sacred spell, in the radiance of an intensely gentle, all-pervading love. I walk up and down the beach and into the scrubby bush that falls down to the rocks, lost inside everything I look at, melted, utterly at peace. I stop to pick up the odd pretty shell, and turn over a leaf; I listen to the muddy stream trickling into the sand, the sea lapping at the shore.
The stony sand scrunches under my feet, the sounds, the touch, telling me about myself before I was taken away to a human world. I am made of this fine beauty, but I can’t hold on to it, it trickles through my fingers like grains of sand. Part of me accepts the human journey, part of me is angry. I turn a shell in my hand; mysteries turn its spirals; we share calcium bones.
I’m angry. I never stop long enough to enter the touch of a broken stone, or whirl with a falling leaf. I keep forgetting myself. Do Dad and Cornelius have any idea what happened? Tears well up and trickle down my cheeks. We’ve reduced nature to an attractive backdrop. We are her children. She grew us. I stare sadly into space and look at my shell in the sand. Society says that if we own things we will be happy. I laugh a little inside. Maybe ownership is a way of trying to come back together.
These life experiences — and many more — are detailed in Dyana’s Anchors in an Open Sea trilogy, beginning with book 1: The Yoga of Sailing.
