Sometimes a poem you wrote years past, finds you again. This one, like quite a few, has not been published (yet). It was shared with a selection of friends at the time, being one of those ‘threshold’ poems I seem to write on the cusp of significant change. After years of life’s drama and my own personal trauma recovery journey, I’d gotten used to difficulty to the point that I expected another unpleasant upheaval in my life. I was poised on the edge of making a huge decision regarding what to do with my house (and mortgage), and the unsustainability of staying on the treadmill. I’d dragged myself through two years of writing a thesis within the sufferance of my circumstances which included the death of my mother, moving home a couple of times, the loss of the job I loved which also kept me financially buoyant, the loss of the justice community I thought I was embraced by, and a major neck/shoulder injury with extensive painful nerve damage.
After submitting my thesis, I just didn’t want to do the survival life I was living anymore. Exhaustion had taken a toll, griefs rolled in and out like big dumpy waves, which left me spluttering and gasping for breath, and I was sick of the relentless question of what job I was going to get once qualified. I had no clue. Frankly, I did not want a job, I just wanted a rest. That’s not easy to pull off on your own with a mortgage, and I felt torn between two stark decisions; sell the house to use the money to take a break and drift until I felt ready to work, or stay on the treadmill to keep paying the mortgage. Neither of these felt good, and I had a panicky fear of ending up homeless or that if I continued to work I’d spiral further into ill health.
I took myself away for a small break, which included a reflective process with others, vulnerably holding two questions; what to do about the house and the question of work? Being away from the rut of my familiar and cyclical way of thinking, a third option presented itself. Rent the house out and travel around New Zealand with the intention of writing, and a strange peace descended upon me. The fear of being swamped and dragged under by another life change was unusually silent. This is when I found myself walking on an eastern beach in Auckland, New Zealand, writing a poem about soft edges.
Sometimes a poem you wrote years past, finds you again. Perhaps, with the potential of changes still ahead in life, this poem has found me to say, it’s going to be okay. Remember, not every upheaval is rough, sometimes change has soft edges.
SOFT EDGES
There is a photo I took some years ago
It found me again and showed me its face
Between waves and sheer cliff was a narrow gap, this was the only way
Noting again how it had felt to pass
Betwixt tumultuous waves and the unyielding towering wall
Desperate not to be dragged out to sea
Nor smashed against the rock inside of me
I carried that picture into my day as I moved eastwards, away from the west
Exploring new terrain
I am walking an unfamiliar shore
This is not unusual for the novice in me
Though there is a difference in today the way my body breathes
And I acknowledge, give praise to the character of this delicate space
I am awake to the softness of edges
As I let my eyes soak in the unresisting gentleness I explore with my senses
I feel the lightest touch through my feet
Though I have lived in those jagged and tight places of ferocious love
Sacred sites of stripping and pounding
In the edges of unrelenting west coast waves
This is the east where I now stand
And the frontier in my soul pulsates with a yearned for peace
Little streams bend and move slowly toward the sea, toward me
Shells in patterns arc in drifts arranged by undemanding tidal melodies
In stillness I expand in wonder and in kind
A rhetorical question is exhaled
Though I ask it slowly, the answer swiftly rebounds
Could occupying this edge now be restful?
With every foot fall, glance, touch and breath
East in me says YES, east as my witness echoes the same caressing refrain
I simply surrender to what had seemed improbable that I could be given and know
Gentle held space that I could hold as my off the map grace
I have trusted in the wisdom offered where sea meets shore
Though savage the weathered wisdom of the west had seemed
I embraced its ruggedness upon my knees
Today all the tenderness runs like miniature rivulets towards my body of being
Where once the wild waves churned over the lifeless sediment in my stagnant state
Turning the ocean, mine, to the colour of all the unwashed death that had been dredged
Today the waters simmer and mirror the hues of the firmament above land, my whenua
My memory holds the roar of surf crashing upon my hearth
Today I learn the sound of lapping
The compassionate ripples return and do not pull away, they nurture my bones and fleshy earth
The ecotone expands and the sparkling waters rise through the gap to the surface in release
The wildness smoothed and honed something in me
The west marked my inner-scape, shaping my being
As sea carves and curves stone over a multitude of freeing oscillations
Now the hollowed-out spaces pool with invitation
Without the alchemy of this contradiction
Allowing the untameable west to transmute my leaden layers
I could not have stood in the serenity of this eastern vista
Without the alteration of being threshed
Of this truth I am sure
Here my pure flame is rehomed and reclaimed
Can occupying this edge now be restful?
With every foot fall, glance, touch and breath
East in me says YES, east as my witness echoes the same caressing refrain
Maree Aldridge, poem and photos 19th April 2018 @ Eastern Beach, Auckland, New Zealand. 1st photo - White Cliffs, Taranaki, NZ. 2nd-8th photo - Eastern Beach.