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Sometimes one year can feel like ten.
the sea is all about us
From The Dry Salvages by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941) The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. ---------------- I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's, The Sea Around Us. It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, Four Quartets , that were largely written during World War II. The Dry Salvages was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad. I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but ...
an old professor of mine once told me that you'll always overestimate what you'll accomplish in the next year, but always underestimate what you'll accomplish in the next three. and so far, he's been pretty bang on. hope that the year that felt like ten was pretty good, even retrospectively... :)
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, Rebecca! I adore that photo. Captures exactly the fuzzy nostalgia that birthdays evoke in me.
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