The Always Blue

on missing summer storms

I didn’t like being gone for so long but I needed to be gone. It has been odd to walk through the universe. Frog-like: sticky, breathing through mud, only coming up for air when absolutely necessary. A. and I have been watching a lot of ocean documentaries, often narrated by David Attenborough or someone who sounds just like him. In the mountains yesterday, on top of an alpine lake, I wondered out loud: Which ocean creatures don’t need to come up for air? Quite a few, I’m sure. Their world must be so different—land to them is the galaxy to us.

There were wild looking worms in the ocean documentary. I began to think about how everything in the universe kind of resembles that worm—the portal, its caulked, angular jaw ready to save itself over and over again. I think that if we were to back up, farther than we’ve ever seen, we would see that the galaxy fits in the size of another worm’s jaw. Or something of the sort. I think we would throw up over the shock of what we have never known. That is just my guess. The ocean makes you think about things that are easy to forget on land.

Nothing is wrong. Or maybe everything is equally wrong. Like if I were to force myself to sit at this desk for hours, I could probably come up with two very long lists. A. and I had a conversation about the word “nothing” and how it is quite philosophical, especially when used in art. Even more, the sentence “We are nothing.” It could mean, for example, we are everything. Or it could mean, Wow the world is beautiful and we are just small little guys. We are nothing.

I went through a July funk, and I can’t say I am totally out of it. But we tromp on. Maybe it is something about how the weather stays the same. There are no summer storms here to mother me, no tempered mid-west. Just blue. I am learning how to take care of myself, and how to be taken care of, in the normality of a day. There has been no bad news, just the trudging of another blue day. How do we respond in this time, the bright yawn of summer?

I often think of Danez Smith’s poem, i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense, when I miss the storms back home. The blue is jarring, the always blue. It is not always blue on the bay. We have at least six months of rain. Here, sometimes the fog crosses the ocean into the bay and settles like a blanket by noon—revealing the home of frogs, weird worms, plankton, a million other things. Sometimes a strong wind comes and the last stubborn man on his sailboat fights to make it in, forgetting his miracle. But what we rarely have are the storms over the water, like rolling handfuls of dark dough. Storms that reminds us of change, all the undiscovered miracles.

Okay, love to all! I am going to go look for a worm-looking cloud, if they ever come.

Picture taken by Jake <3