Newsgroups: alt.kalbo
From: li@inigo.Data-IO.COM
Subject: Li by the Sea Shore
Message-ID: <9312140014.AA04558@inigo.Data-IO.COM>
Originator: spok@F.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
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Organization: Grapevine's Posting Service
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 00:14:17 GMT
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"Rejoice over everything. Exult. Exhilarate. Be glad. Be
delighted, elated, and bowled over with joy! Frolic freely,
hop, hope, dance onthe dare, cheer, champion the little
ones, revel in the riotous light. invoke God without
ceasing. Pray with passion. Whatever you do, do not quench
the Spirit. Take care not to douse or dampen the bold blaze
in your depths. Jump into life. Hold fast to it. Give
thanks for everything. For everything, even the most
misshapen and misunderstood, is the disguise of the
divine."

                        -- Rev. Susan Virginia  Hull
                            Circular Congregational Church
                       Charleston, SC
                              
                              
My Sea Day began with a baked pancake, giving a backrub to a
loved one, and a kiss to my mate.

Flynn was visiting for the weekend. He'd had a free airplane
ticket to anywhere in the Continental U.S. and decided to fly
out to Seattle for the weekend just to see me and the JF.
That was kinda cool and kinda sad in some ways and kinda glad
in others.

You see, Flynn and I once had a Scene together. A thorough
one where I discovered more about myself, about the depths of
my capability to trust another, about my limits and my loves
and my knowledge to myself and shoving back the kind of 'fear
of pain' that Tanais talked about. It was a passage of some
kind. And it broke through, for me, a lot of things, and gave
me a *lot* of joy.

For a while, Flynn and I had had a passionate kind of early
love. The kind where we're not just infactuated with each
other, but fasinated with the depths that were being shown
and showing. It burned bright and hot for a while; but is
banking into a slower, long term friendship. It's never been
a sexual relationship in any sense of that word; but it has
been, at times, an extraordinarily intimate relationship,
especially since I'm very much married.

As an explaination of kinds...the way some people are
naturally polyamorous, I'm naturally monogamous. I am only
attracted, physically, to my mate and just about everyone else
is, if not actively replusive, at least cold for me. I'm just
*made* that way, and I haven't really figured out why. I
know that all my life I've had a string of SO's, one at a
time, male and female, so I am very much bi-sexual...but
monogamous.

Emotionally, I seem to be attracted to everyone, and
strangely enough, I can be deeply, intimately and absolutely
infactuated with someone but I have to *push* to feel
physically attracted to them at that time. With Flynn I
pushed that a *lot*, even sleeping in the same bed with him
for one night, about six months ago, but I found myself
unable to sleep and unhappy.

This was the visit where I had to tell him that I just couldn't sleep with
him; but I *did* promise him a thorough backrub. And it was sad, for me to
disappoint him in that way...but...on Sunday morning, I was able to give
him a solid and through backrub for a good half hour before breakfast was
ready. And for all the disappointments I'd given him, the backrub was very
sweet because not only was I able to give him deep relaxation, love,
something of my time and concentrated attention; but he was kind enough
and trusting enough of me to stomp on his internal reflexes and give me
enough control *to* relax his body. And, after I'd mostly turned him into
limp happiness, I found myself swallowing a lump in my throat brought to
it simply by his trust in me and how much I really *did* care about him.
So I told him, and that was neat. 

Then to church, where I got the above quote and a really
decent account of the Songs of Women in the Old Testiment and
a thorough accounting for Mary's decision and *knowing*
consent to God's plan for her in the birth of her son. There
was a flood of children as well at the service and their
message was fun.And the Speakin' Deacon, Sue Striefel told
everyone about her 'trip up the mountain'. After being
already overwhelmed with the preparations for the Holiday
Season, she had wanted to just stay behind when her family
and friends went up to get their trees; but she went along
anyway. At the top of the mountain, she found the time and
the strength to take a walk away from the crowd, and found a
stump to sit on near the top of the mountain and *looked*
around...

She was surrounded by the Cascades, covered with snow and
trees and the bare bones of the earth around her. The sky
above was the pale blue of winter, slowly being encroached
upon by clouds that misted snow in a transluscent curtain
that moved so gradually to swallow them up. The soft silence
of the falling snow filled her with the Spirit and she
finally could *feel* the meaning behind the season.

And to end it she wished us all our Moment of Silence to
prepare the way in our hearts for the real Spirit behind the
Christmas Season.

Flynn commented, later, that he just found it *odd* to be in a
church that, not ONCE mentioned the ominpresent Fire and
Brimstone that he'd always found in the churchs of Alabama.
john and I just laughed softly. Flynn noted that, admittedly,
he just couldn't see either of us *in* a church that preached
that way, either...

The weather all week has been in the low 40's (around 4-8 C),
with high winds, and lots of *cold* rain. Blustery, steel grey
skies (the kind that depress most people) and blowing mist and
rain. Nothing froze, just wet and windy and cold. There have
been some heavy showers; but on Sunday, for a brief while at
the end of church, the sun came out.

After the service and a brief meeting about fixing the roof,
John, Flynn, and I went out towards the Sound. First to the
waterfront, around 1pm, to find some food and see if there was
any access along the public/tourist oriented waterfront.

I'd been worrying a little all week, remembering that there
*isn't* much, if any access to the water from the commercial
waterfront, and, once there, my fears were mostly confirmed.
Also, the water by the piers was kinda dirty and depressing,
and tamed by the breakwaters and the proximity of all the
piers. The Sound slopped around against the concrete pilings
and was kinda depressing. But then we had us some lunch...and
Ivar's has good, quick seafood and a creamy, white clam
chowder that is thick and HOT and makes almost any day more
worthwhile.

John laughed when I talked about jumping a fence, and climbing
down one of the piers to the water and said "I've got a plan."

So we all piled back into the car, and drove a bit north and a
bit west and then John got lost and we happened upon a park
none of us had known of and with HUGE boats and glass
entryways to aluminium piers. One pier lead out
to a small all-night deli that had a small ferry out to the
breakwater that provided the western wall of the marina. The
breakwater a tumble of HUGE rock and, beyond it, we could
just see small plumes of flung sea water...

The three of us asked the girl behind the counter in the shop
if we could go out to the breakwater, and she looked at us as
if we were crazy; but she smiled and said, Yes... the ferry
was free, and she'd call the ferryman if we really wanted
out. We looked at each other, nodded and she called. Five
minutes later, a spry old man with eyes the color of the sea
beyond the rock, laughed and started up the HUGE diesel
engine in the ferry and told us he'd like to idle it a bit so
that it wouldn't quit on the way out... He handled that huge
ferry as if it were nothing but thisledown, turning it on a
penny, catching and controlling its weight as if it were
nothing but a floating rubber duck. The wind combed my short
hair and whistled across the mouth of my bottle of pop I'd
bought at the little all-night deli shop. Liking the tune
that the wind sang, I tilted the bottle about until it sang
different notes...

And then we were out on the breakwater, at 12:50 by John's
watch, 12;57 by Flynn's. The Sound was wrinkled with wind and
wave, dark, iron grey because of the clouds that were
scudding in above it. The little clear sky there was mostly
pale, winter blue wisped with grey and white from vapor. We
trod a platform on the breakwater that told us that there
were 500,000 tons or one *billion* pounds of rock in it, and
that it had been seeded with native Sound plantlife and had
grown a respectable reef (including local corals, sealife,
and plantlife) there. We even saw two *big* birds that looked
like brown/grey herons fly over us to their nest on the
breakwater before we went back down to the breakwater side of
the pier to take our little 'dip'.

The peir was on the leeward side of the breakwater and the
water was clear, grey, and we could see waves gently sway the
plant life below the surface, along with the darting movement
of tiny fish and the cresent shape of sheelfish. I took off
my right shoe and sock and then shrugged and pulled off the
left ones as well. The concrete on the peir was cold beneath
my feet and when I put them into the water I yelped a bit at
the shock of the contact. Flynn laughed, kindly at my yelp,
as he also put a foot into the waters of the Sound.

It was like putting my feet, for a moment, into liquid
fire... the cold *burned* for an instance and then my feet
were alive with tingling. I submerged them up past the
ankles; and the left one, the one that had been hurt in the
game a month ago, ached, sharp and sweet for an instant, and
then all the bone-deep ache slowly started to drain out of
it. "Wow..." I said. The water was clear and still on the
leeward side, and looked, a little, like liquid ice smoothing
over the bruised purple nails of my left toes. I left them
in, feeling the ache drain out, and I thought about Michael
in the Hawii, Jezebel on her wind-blown coast, DM out in the
summer bright surf, Draco singing his ritual, and the others
who were making the effort to touch and be touched by the
same body of water...

Hi.  :)

And in a way...the cold, as intense as it was, left *no* room
in my mind for anything else but the fact that I was
*touching* the water...like nothing else possibly could have,
it focused me for that Moment. A moment a little like
Sue's...where I was immersed in *my* connection to the world.

After the ten minute dip, I pulled my feet out and they were
tingling throughly and bright red with cold (cold actually
*increases* the circulation in an isolated limb as the blood
rushes in trying to warm things up). I dried them off with a
sock and then put my socks and shoes back on and went back up
to the viewing platform, and into the teeth of the winter
wind, to get a better look at the Sound and the surrounding
view to recount for everyone here.

>From the platform there was a magnificent view of Seattle, clean glass
towers, with the flowing clouds behind it. Mary Kuhner once wrote about
Seattle that, even when it isn't raining there, it's a city that looks as
if it's dreaming of rain... To the south, at first all one could see are a
line of black mountains tipped with snow and what looked like a bank of
clouds behind them, until one realized that the 'clouds' were actually the
northern flanks of Mt. Rainier and the mountain reached *up* beyond the
clouds that hung an equal distance above the foothills as the foothills
were tall. to the west, the Olympics were hidden behind oncoming cloud
cover. Behind us was Magnolia bluff, pink sandstone covered with
scrubbrush and designer houses. 

And for a moment, a shaft of sunlight cut through all the
cloud cover and shown upon the wrinkled surface of the Sound,
and the lighting of the sunlight was just breathtakingly
bright. That's when we heard the diesel roar of the ferry
start up again. The ferryman drove us back to the dock, and
we walked the walkways back to the shore, and as we reached
the shore, it started drizzling again, and we saw the shaft
of sunlight fade and then die away...

So that was our Sea Trip.