Many years ago I had a friendship with a woman who left Cortes Island and moved to Kauai. Although we thought well of each other, our time together was often strained with complex feelings, at least it seemed so to me. Even though I have traveled to Kauai on previous vacations I have never tried to find her, or made an effort at understanding the difficult feelings.BREATHING UNDER WATER
A mottled gray green form moved through the pond water. Its surging pausing progress came to rest on a submerged twig protruding from a floating island. A woman sitting on the rim of the pond, with a mental chaos of many tasks to do, watched as the form resolved itself into a frog with the stump of its tadpole tail still visible. “The head could use a rest” she thought, and so she focused on the frog that had now extended its legs out into a resting position, as if it were a child holding onto the rim of a pool. “This is a child” the woman thought, “even though this face has many stories already.”
The frog gathered its angular legs and blunt toed feet beneath its body. It began to crawl slowly up an accidental ladder of twigs and sticks from the underside of the island to its top layer of mossy mud. The frog kept climbing until it clung to a green stem in the thin morning sunshine, blinking calmly into the enormity of its first breath of air.
“Now there is also long life in this face,” the woman thought, “at the end of this particular journey underwater.” The woman thought of the news she had received: a call from far away saying her father had died. As she sat in the strengthening sun, watching the frog feel its radiance for the first time on its slowly drying body, she thought that maybe this is how it is for everyone. “Maybe this life on earth is the time we spend breathing under water, and then we discover the sun.”
Although these passages are about understanding change because of death, the dramatic transformation from one perspective to another certainly applies in this story of rediscovering a friend. At one moment I was uncertain and confused, and in the next we were laughing in the Hawaiian sun. Maybe understanding change is not so much the task, as is just accepting the change that comes, and basking in the sun of its new perspective.
A mottled gray green form moved through the pond water. Its surging pausing progress came to rest on a submerged twig protruding from a floating island. A woman sitting on the rim of the pond, with a mental chaos of many tasks to do, watched as the form resolved itself into a frog with the stump of its tadpole tail still visible. “The head could use a rest” she thought, and so she focused on the frog that had now extended its legs out into a resting position, as if it were a child holding onto the rim of a pool. “This is a child” the woman thought, “even though this face has many stories already.”
The frog gathered its angular legs and blunt toed feet beneath its body. It began to crawl slowly up an accidental ladder of twigs and sticks from the underside of the island to its top layer of mossy mud. The frog kept climbing until it clung to a green stem in the thin morning sunshine, blinking calmly into the enormity of its first breath of air.
“Now there is also long life in this face,” the woman thought, “at the end of this particular journey underwater.” The woman thought of the news she had received: a call from far away saying her father had died. As she sat in the strengthening sun, watching the frog feel its radiance for the first time on its slowly drying body, she thought that maybe this is how it is for everyone. “Maybe this life on earth is the time we spend breathing under water, and then we discover the sun.”
Although these passages are about understanding change because of death, the dramatic transformation from one perspective to another certainly applies in this story of rediscovering a friend. At one moment I was uncertain and confused, and in the next we were laughing in the Hawaiian sun. Maybe understanding change is not so much the task, as is just accepting the change that comes, and basking in the sun of its new perspective.
