Grand Isle – Awakenings
A very last minute decision changed our agenda for the weekend to driving to Grand Isle with Loca to meet friends. The barrier island is at the mouth of Barataria Bay where it meets the Gulf of Mexico. During Katrina, there was five foot swells that destroyed many homes and buildings there, but today, you’d hardly notice.
In the mornings, T and I would take long walks down the beach with Loca and the first night we went to sleep I had a vision of us in the far future. She made a comment that my marriages were 5 years, 5 months, and 15 years but that we will be together 50 years – and for the first time in my life I can look out that far and see that same vision.
My dear friend J brought me a book as a house gift called Awakenings that has a zen thought and image on each page. J thought it was clever that I am in a relationship with a woman and it is my awakening to a new life – the one that has been calling to me. The first page I turned to said a child does not belong to you, but to the universe. The first one T turned to said:
Great unity connects all things,
Great darkness dissolves all things,
Great vision penetrates all things,
Great equality encompasses all things,
Great law rules all things,
Great trust earns all things,
Great balance sustains all things.
Walking along the shore of Grand Isle, where I almost fled to this last July when I needed time to write and be alone, I thought of the life that I have awakened to. Kate Chopin spent her summers there and wrote The Awakening, but her protagonist, Edna Pontelier met a tragic end – she drowned either by suicide or fatigue in these same waters – but metaphorically she died to be born, to be self-actualized – to fully develop her emotional self.
Woman goes on journey, comes back changed: I woke this morning to a sense of peace that rarely accompanies my Monday routine. It was the peace of knowing that no matter what, I love this person lying next to me, profoundly, and this love has opened a new way of seeing, being that has little to do with alternative lifestyle and lots to do with who she is and who I am – and oh, what a difference to me.