A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

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November 26, 2013

Buzzards

After high school, I vowed never to return to Palm Beach, a thin sliver of island that reminded me of all things lost in the cranky cogs of adolescence: wide-eyed jubilance, minnows and unconditional parental love (Later I learned their boundless love was not as mythic as teenagedom suggested. But that took decades…)

The tropical sun was reserved for holidays when I could loosen the vice grip of New York City and laziness became art: poolside reading, Dad’s cooking, twelve-hour sleeps. Over cocktails, I hated it here – how fake, weird, racist, stupid, greedy the inhabitants, how soporific the lifestyle. Couldn’t you just roll over and die in the blaze?

Then on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, a conspiracy of fates shipwrecked me. Moored by family illness and eventually love, I stayed, bought a house over the bridge and had some kids of my own.

Time rounded those reactive edges that tugged me to and fro, that trapped in the dooming treason of choice, the youthful delusion that life is anything other than the reinforcement of habits.

And slowly, the world unfolded before my eyes.

The buzzards float along the currents of the winds, hundreds of feet in the sky. In late afternoon, they swarm on buildings that edge the Intercoastal, covering the mirrored windows with hunched bodies. Actually, they are no more buzzards than butterflies, but rather two species of vultures: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. The former is the larger of the two with a red face and beak, while the latter has a smaller wingspan, a gray face and beak.

Egrets peck through the palmetto grasses and troops of white ibis with hooked bills hang out on the curb of my neighborhood. Often bobbing alone on buoys, pelicans sometimes fly in formation along the crashing surf.

By the glittering blue of the Intercoastal, a hawk beats its wings above the water where old timers on fold-out beach chairs cast their lines, reeling in whatever they can hook, snook if they are lucky. Every evening the sky blooms purple and neon pink; the moon rises over the ocean. And in my garden, hibiscus flower, three types of gardenia and some sweet almond vines.

The two Vanda orchids hanging from my front porch remind me of my father. His grave is shaded by banyans in the old cemetery. Above him, the buzzards circle.

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November 11, 2013

Even the Orchids Miss Him

Even the orchids miss him.

The last few years  he fought the cancer, the orchids exploded in their most vibrant expressions. Perhaps knowing what they knew, they created final symphonies of color where and when they could, blooming and fading as they do every year according to some mysterious tropical calendar. Plants know their temporality better than we – some dying after just one year, some duplicate, propagate, shoot off into replicated bundles, some bear fruit, pecked by blackbirds, their seeds deposited miles away into the clouds. There is no birth, there is no death, just cycles along the wind and under the arms of bees.

And then he was gone, that presence they had sensed for hours of each day as he walked the long rows of the orchid house. The orchids have faded since he passed. They are in mourning, like dogs missing their master. How many plants in the wild have human friends? These were the most beautiful orchids in the world simply because my father had walked through their house, loving them as his own creations.

We can change the colors of the world with our hearts.

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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