Yesterday morning I got up early and poked my nose out the front door to see what kind of a day to expect. There was a definite scent of unfallen snow and a very cold, strong wind. I found myself lifting up onto my toes in the wind, excited at the coming storm...

and then I realized...

...storms are beautiful, storms are awe-inspiring, and being out in the storm is exciting and exhilarating...

...and I miss it a lot. Not only do I miss being out in a storm, but I miss being out there fighting for my life in perilous, life-threatening situations. This is something I never admitted to myself before. Damn!

The best, most important part of it is that moment after the crisis is past, you know definitely that you will survive, and then you look at the people who shared it with you and grin at each other like mad things, too breathless to even say, "We made it!" And it doesn't even occur to you that you are out of your mind on adrenalin or that this was a test and you passed or that you never ever actually meant to do that in the first place - it just happened and you don't deserve credit for anything but foolhardiness, if even that. It's that moment in which you realize that you're really, totally alive - every part of you is vibrating with life and you know it! You are fully in the moment, feeling the gestalt, in the zone, slapped up alongside the head by the Aha! of a kind of here and now enlightenment.

It's a bit like the early stages of falling in love and reaching the point where you suddenly realize you're both committed fully to each other. But different... It's a little like pulling off some act of creation that you weren't really sure you could do and seeing that it is good, it says what you couldn't have said any other way. But different...

That dream I told you about in my last blog and the post-script dream I mentioned in the comments on it on Multiply - I've been thinking about it. More precisely, I've been letting it roll around in the back of my mind like a loose cannon, unsettling and breaking through my habitual mental constructs and walls.

And I've realized that, in my own quiet way, I'm an adrenalin junkie. Sheesh! This is a startling thing to realize at this age. And I very much miss having these adventures. Just a week or two before Thanksgiving, I went over to my son's home for an early celebration. The idea was to avoid the horrific holiday traffic and long delays waiting for an overwhelmed ferry and to take advantage of the first opportunity in 30 years for his father, temporarily visiting from Norway, to join the celebration. On the way there my car died, stranding me in the left lane of heavy rush-hour Seattle traffic. Naturally, I called my son, Jon, said I'd be late and might need rescue, and stood beside the car until a passing driver asked, "Do you need help?" He kindly towed me off the road to the nearest safe parking place to wait for Jon, who can always be counted on for rescue, to arrive. He brought his father of course, and while Jon peered under the hood, Jeff looked out at the dense traffic rushing by and said, "That can't have been fun."

I replied, "No, but I've been in a lot worse situations." After thinking a moment, I added, "We both have..."

We looked down at the parking lot pavement while we both thought about that, flashing through a series of shared desperate memories, and after a bit he said, "Yes, and we didn't always have someone to come and rescue us."

We looked up at each other and grinned widely, and said together, "But we always made it!" In that moment a whole bunch of complex, layered, interwoven things happened that I won't try to go into here - healing for me, maybe healing for him, more than that. Shared history, yes. Heavy stuff, yes. Recognition of value, yes. The dropping away of years of distance and the echo of those wild, indelible moments of shared "We're alive! We made it!"

Last spring I woke up in the hospital after three hours of surgery and another full day of heavy sedation, with the nurse saying, "Be careful, you've lost a lot of blood and may feel faint when you move." There were 32 staples in my middle, a giant scar, and I had somehow acquired pneumonia. She asked me how I felt, and I said emphatically, "I feel great!" She looked startled and I didn't have the breath to explain, but I felt a lot better - much more well - than I had in a long while. Yet this "great" was an altogether different feeling than the one I'm talking about above. That triumphantly alive feeling is also different from the feeling you have after being in a very worrying situation where you know you are at risk and you worry about whether or not you're going to make it. I'm talking about the kind of situation that requires every bit of every strength you have - mental, physical, emotional, spiritual - in order to make it through. To give up, even for a little bit, would be literal sudden death. The intensity, the focus is like nothing else I've ever experienced.

I miss having those adventures...

No, I haven't gone off my head and I'm not going out to set sail into far northern seas in a winter force 10 storm in an elderly, leaky boat. Been there, done that, don't need to do it again, don't even need the T-shirt. But I am wondering what else may yet come, life is never dull for long - or hardly even at all...

I'm definitely not inviting you, O Universe, to do that to me again, but adventures... well, I do wonder...

I just woke up from a dream and am sitting here, still a bit dazed, and wondering, "Why am I dreaming of turbulent waters?"

Good question.

In the dream my husband and I and a couple of other people had sailed down Loch Etive in Argyll, Scotland, and were going through the Falls of Lora. (Logic tells me it must have been my husband, Neil, who died on another island far away some years ago. This is because he is the only one with whom I might have found myself in such a situation, but in the dream I didn't know really who he was nor who the others were.)

Loch Etive is beautiful - in sunny weather, which does occasionally happen, even in Scotland. Swans glide peacefully over the waters; Red Highland Cattle graze on the shores, their long, curly hair moving in the breeze. The surrounding hills reflect in the loch's surface, steep and still. My dream wasn't on one of those lovely days.

The wind was behind our little Norwegian faering, shoving us faster down the loch than the tidal current was, using our oars just for steering. We suddenly found ourselves in the Falls of Lora, battered and drenched, fighting the oars, desperately shoving ourselves away from the rocks. I suggest that, right now, you go to Google > Images > Falls of Lora and have a look at some of the more dramatic photos of people kayaking through. You'll see my dream - only without the gear, without the kayak and in an open faering. Faerings are mighty seaworthy little rowboats, but you'd need to be a Viking to tackle these waters in one - and a foolhardy Viking at that.

In the midst of all this slamming around, I woke up. Silent bedroom; stationary bed, twilight outside, quiet. I don't know what all this was about, but experience with my dreams suggests that it might in some way be predictive of yet more Interesting Times. We'll see.

Believe it or not, it left me feeling such longing for the hills and lochs and glens - and, yes, even the storms!

I've been off playing, and because of the turbulance of Yahoo (see my next post on other turbulance), I've been blogging on Multiply in Jesa's Unsteady Coracle for a while, and if you want to catch up with sporadic posts, you can there.

But I'm going to give Yahoo another go...

Back in a few!

Politics

He wants power

He has power

He wants more

And his country will break in his hands,

Is breaking now.

Alkaios of Mytilene, c.620 B.C.
(quoted in Pure Pagan by Burton Raffel)

I don't usually quote other people here, but this little gem was irresistable.