such_ferocious_beauty ovenbird In a dream that finds me often I am standing on an empty expanse of sandy beach when the water begins to rise at an alarming rate. Sometimes it has the violent force of a tsunami and sometimes it’s the rapid swell of the tide coming in. Every time, I run. Every time I am hemmed in by an unforgiving cliff face or a fence too high to scale. The water keeps coming and I am tearing off fingernails on the rock, desperately trying to climb something that refuses to hold me. When I first heard Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies sing “Flood”, it was like having this dream reflected back at me in musical form. She sings: Watching the water rise Caught between the river and the rock face Watching the water rise Should I follow it down To where the river meets the sea? Or let it devour me Riven and floating free? It’s a song about memory and mortality–the unrelenting press of our own inevitable demise, the way memory fails and our minds are vulnerable to destructive flood-waters, the helplessness that comes from watching someone you love slip away. My recurring dream is about this too. It forces me to contend with an ocean that rises just a little more each year I live. I’m standing in water at least waist deep now, and there is nothing I can do to make it recede. And I wonder what would happen if, in my dreams and in my life, I chose not to run at all, but to let the tide close over my head. Margo sings in a voice that cracks me open: Nowhere left to hide Guess I’ll follow it down To where the river meets the sea And let the current carry me Through such ferocious beauty And just let the water rise. I close my hand around “such ferocious beauty.” I see every facet of truth in those words, and my eyes start watering from all that refracted light. As the water creeps ever higher, I wonder what it would take to surrender. 250513 what's it to you? who go blather from