Grace

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break. William Shakespeare.

I walked along the MunjipTrack this morning. It was windy and storm clouds were scudding across the horizon, but, out on the Tollgate Islands, a beam of bright sunlight shone down upon the wave strewn ocean, a message, to even to the most pragmatic and least spiritual among us, that hope always returns to human hearts.

Some people have words for the year, some mantras to keep going in dark and difficult times; when loss comes, as it does to all humans, I think about what that one person taught me across their life. Grace is a hard word to define and means so many things to so many different people. Grace is the ability to sit with who we are in stillness and silence without the need to distract ourselves from dark moments or equally joyful moments. Grace allows us to forgive ourselves, but more importantly others as we each conceive of ourselves as centres of the universe whilst in reality we are so many small and transient creatures spinning around glued by gravity to this strange and beautiful blue green planet beneath a twinkling night sky.

Go with grace.

The Significance of Ten

I don’t know that ten really means anything except as a base for the decimal system, but there’s something compelling about things that come in ten. On the tenth of January, I took the kayak down to the beach – empty thanks to the steady rain – and paddled south to practice some surf landings. Ten surf landings, of course. On my first run into the beach, I thought the swell is too small to count, but as I sat in the whitewater zone looking for a break to paddle back out, I saw that the waves were over my head and so qualify as “surf to 1.0 metre.”

It has been tough training for an assessment alone. I have no-one to run scenarios or act as a crash test dummie for rescues, so I’ve been doing my best running scenarios in my head and working on my own paddle skills. On January 5^th, half of ten, Doug and I went paddling, just paddling, out to North Head into a northerly wind and then the sprint to come back catching runners. I caught lots of runners. It’s the tenth of January and I’ve got eight days to go – providing the conditions cooperate.