Viewing entries tagged
freedom

One year

A year ago, Rach and I got married. In a beautiful mess of laughter and tears and kisses, we put rings on fingers, made vows and commitments, and danced through the night. It was a powerful day, a chapter shift, a line-in-the-sand for us. A rebirth.

Today we are in a little cabin on Prevelly beach, a few hours south of Perth. This campsite is special to us now - we tented here for our honeymoon, and are back for our anniversary. It's 5:30 in the morning, and Rach is still asleep. The walls of the cabin are kind of magical - they seem solid, but they let in every bit of the chill from outside, so I'm already awake. Rach of course is completely content in a 5-degree climate, but I can't feel my toes.

There is a pigeon somewhere outside, who has been releasing a slow and rhythmic chant solidly for the last hour, like a priestly mantra, covering the campsite in a resonant blessing: "whooot... whooot... whooot..." There are finches at the window, back for more breadcrumbs, and I can just hear the distant crash of the tide on rocks.

If I'm honest, it's not just my frozen toes that are keeping me awake. I'm thinking too much. And there is some fear, too. It's been a year since we married, five years all up since we even met. We stripped away all our security and careers and started a whole new life together, and it's been mind-bogglingly amazing. And impossibly hard. We started with love, a love that immediately sunk deep into our cores, and has held us together through all the things.

But in these early hours, I sometimes wonder if love is enough. This is a world of hustle and progress, where we have to make real-life grown-up decisions every day. We have to work and provide for our family, and do all the responsible life things. Am I being naive to make "love" my life's priority?

The pigeon continues to whoot, and I carefully roll myself out of bed. My toes are mutinous, avoiding the cold floorboards so that I am waddling on my heels and the sides of my feet. I penguin my way across to my shoes and pull them on, barely keeping my balance, then step out into the morning.

It's cold outside, but no colder than inside, thanks to our magical cabin walls. On this day a year ago it was not as cold, but I remember Rach and I watching the sky all day, watching the clouds gather closer and darker over our outdoor ceremony space. We would look up to the sky, and then look at each other, and then one of us would remind the other "hey, I love you," and we would agree that no, the clouds won't break our day, and that yes, we would totally do our first dance in the rain.

It did rain in the end, but later on when everyone was inside. And we did dance in the rain, just a bit, before running for cover.

The beach is only a couple of minutes walk from the cabin, not enough to actually warm up, so I find myself too soon stationary again, standing at the shoreline with arms wrapped around arms like an octopus in a straight jacket, my eyes on the horizon. I can't hear the pigeon's blessing anymore, just the ocean's soft applause, and the fizz of the tide soaking into the sand at my feet.

I stare into the horizon, a blinding white that splits the blues of ocean and sky, and send my questions across the waters:

"Have I made the right choices for my wife and kids?"
"Am I being responsible enough?"
"Am I putting too much faith in love?"
"Am I a good husband?"

In the bright silence, I wonder if there even are answers for such questions. I close my eyes and slow my breathing and try and listen anyway.

I hear the fizz of the tide. A seagull cawing overhead. The slap and crash of waves on rocks.

I hear Rach, a year ago today, reading her vows to me. She declares her security is in our love. She says she is so proud of the way we forge our lives together. She tells me I am her home, and it is a joy to build it together. She says we are a shiny mess of potential, and that we live our lives in uncertainty, and that is what allows such an exaltation of our spirits.

I hear the ocean's applause.

--

Rach finds me a little later on the front porch of our cabin. The sunlight is stronger now, but I am still wrapped in a blanket. Her toes seem completely content out here in the chill. She nuzzles her face into my neck, and then peers over to the notebook on my lap. I've copied out a page from Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet", and she smiles in recognition as she reads:

You have been told also that life is darkness...
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,
and to one another, and to God.

Freedom, ambition and Jack Kerouac

This morning Rach and I woke early and walked into town. There's a hole-in-the-wall bakery called Little Loaf, and they make the greatest bacon and egg baps, and it was a great day for a bap.

We turn down Orient Street, which faces us directly into the sunlight, and we’re blinded - everything goes pale and bright. The colour washes out of the landscape, leaving a haze of watercolour impressions, and we have to drop our gaze, forced to focus on whatever is a few metres in front of our feet. We notice the cracks in the pavement, the single tulip by the gate at number twelve, the crunchy-crisp air on our skin. And wrapped in this brightwash, we turn inwards, to our private reflections:
Life is magic. Anything is possible. Am I doing okay? Does it even matter?

The moment stretches, floods, stops time, opens our minds. We can hear each other’s breaths.

There's a beautiful line in Jack Kerouac's book On the Road, where the protagonist, Sal, describes a week in Denver, all late night bars, and girls, and cherry trees in bloom:

“...the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.”

And I resonate with this so much. These sunlit moments of open skies and in-the-moment experiences. A part of me wants to get off the train, you know? Quit the stage. Just walk away from all the pressure and responsibility and flop on my back in a field.

But, what about goals? Ambitions? How do we get anything done in life?

I’m asking these questions because for the last few weeks, Rach and I have been filming an online curriculum, and it's really hard. We're not on our backs in a field, instead, we pointed to the top of the mountain and said "there!" and began to climb. We made some great progress up the slopes, and then lost our footing and scratched our knees and egos. Then we climbed some more, and slipped back a bit more, and found some paths around and around the mountain, everslowly gaining ground, still nowhere near the top, but now too far from the bottom to give up.

Storytelling theory says that until a protagonist wants something, their story can’t get going. Characters needs to want things - ideally things that are worthwhile - and they need to want them enough to overcome great conflict to attain them. A meaningful story is found on the path of conflict, say the ancient tellers.

Still, who deliberately chooses conflict? I want Kerouac's open-world freedom. No dreams or ambitions, just the in-the-moment experiences of the beat generation he captures so perfectly.

Here’s how I think it resolves:

The world is open before us, like Kerouac writes. With all its options and possibilities and opportunities. And for a while we stand there, without dreams or fears, and just react our way forward, embracing all the wonders of life.

It’s not story, but it is beautiful. It is art, whimsy, a tossing about of our souls on the wind. We're kids dancing in gardens.

But eventually, somewhere amongst all that soul-tossing, we realise that there are, in fact, things we want. Specific things. Things that we want enough to fight for. Things worthy of prioritising above the myriad other possibilities that are out there. So we narrow our gaze, isolate our focus. In a world wide-open with possibilities we choose this one and we get to work.

Now we have a story. A character who wants something, and will overcome all sorts of conflict to get it.

But where does that leave the art? The beauty? The whimsy? Does the having of goals in life require us to give up the open-skies freedom of not having dreams or goals?

What I realised this morning, walking with Rach in the whitewash sunlight, was that when we choose this life of dreams and ambition, we are setting ourselves up for conflict, but the conflict doesn’t break us. It grows us, changes us, and becomes a kind of container that brackets these tiny moments, so that in the breaths between tension, in the sunrise light that blinds us whole, the world is still open to us. And with the sharp clarity that comes from climbing the mountain, we find eternity in every step.