The Outer Banks is a fond memory, both recent and distant.
It seems that, while I know I was there, I wasn’t there at all.
A week isn’t enough time to find everything I left there the year before, or the year before that or the one before that.
I feel, while I am there, as though I am as much a part of that world as the marshes and gnarled, wind-withered trees.
Yet now that I am back in the world I know, I wonder if I were ever there at all.
Will it remember me?
The sea, the sand, the wind, the beauty, the essence?
Will it long for me as I do for it?
I think not.
I am an outsider, a passerby, an intruder.
I am a stranger.
It doesn’t make it any less compelling or beautiful.
It simply makes me sad to know that there was nothing of myself I could leave behind to remind that place who I am so it will recognize me when I return.
The soft sounds or the heavy, torrential pounding that a good storm can produce.
Imagine my joy when I recently learned that there is a musical instrument that can make the sound of rain.
It is called a rainstick and, as with all things that are new to me, I had to find out more about it.
What is it? Where does it come from? What is it made of? What makes it work? How does that sound get inside?
I asked all of these questions and went in search of answers.
I found them.
I was told only that the sound of rain in a friend’s musical composition was made by a rainstick which he described as “a percussion instrument that lets pebbles cascade over small spikes”.
With that image in mind, it was hard for me to imagine something other than plinko. You know, drop the disk and let it bounce off spikes and hope it falls into the slot you were shooting for. It is a game, one of pure chance, and I was not about to be satisfied with that.
After researching the rainstick, I found the history of it to be most fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I almost forgot why I was looking it up to begin with.
As it turns out, the origin of the traditional South American rain stick isn’t known, not definitively, anyway. Indian tribes in Chile, Peru and Mexico all lay claim to having invented them, and one compelling theory contends that African slaves who arrived in the New World during the Spanish occupation brought them.
The euphonious sound of the traditional rainstick were supposedly once thought to have the power to bring rain and was used in prayer ceremonies among the Aztecs as well as others. The sound was so lovely, however, that it made its way into the making of music, something that is as old as time itself. Music. And, now that I think about it, rain, as well.
The rainstick is made primarily from the dried Eulychnia acida, or Capao cactus after it has lived a long and healthy sixty plus years. The “arms” are harvested, dried, cleaned and hollowed out. Spines are pushed into the hard body of the cactus and many very small stones are sealed inside. When the instrument is inverted, the stones cascade along the helically spaced spikes making the sound of rain. (There are likely other varieties of cacti that rainsticks can be fashioned from, but Capao came up consistently in my research.)
Ingenious.
As with everything else, however, it had to be classified, reclassified and sub-classified. It is now known to be part of the percussion/shaken idiophone family. The shaken part is, as any music nerd can likely tell you, a sub-category of the idiophone. Me? I had to look it up.
I listened to the piece that drew my attention to the instrument over and over while writing this post. I listened to it because it is brilliantly done and pleasing to the ear. The fact that is was written by a friend was coincidental, but he doesn’t need to know that I found such favor with it. Don’t take my word for it, though, take a listen and judge for yourselves and then decide if you can live out the rest of your life without owning your own rainstick.
I decided that I couldn’t. I’m expecting it in the mail by next Friday.
I am out there swinging. For those who suffer from manic episodes, no explanation is necessary, for the rest of you, all I can offer is a pathetic, well meant yet mostly misunderstood, “I’m sorry”.
What am I sorry for? Ummm, where should I start?
I can’t explain it. I don’t even try anymore. It makes less sense to me when I try to make it make sense to someone else.
So I don’t because that in itself is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle.
I’ll be back, though, at some point, as my old “weirdly abnormal” self.
Lucid and in total (okay, yes, a stretch even on a good day) control.
Until then … well, just go with it because ultimately, it is what it is.
And I take it as it comes, deal with it however I can and sometimes ignore those who are most important to me. I, most times, inadvertently, end up hurting somebody’s feelings.
It isn’t always pretty but neither is reality; that’s just the way I roll if I want to survive the storm.
and I’ll say it again. I am much too soft-hearted to be a nurse. So many things that I come into contact with on a daily basis makes me want to weep and scream at the injustice of life.
I am supposed to simply speak to people and let them know that they are not just a patient, but it isn’t that simple. They are people to me.
They are my mother.
They are my father.
They are my daughter, nieces and sister.
They become part of my heart and being and I take them home with me.
I have cried many, many tears for those that I visit with. I have held their hands, held their family’s hands and prayed with them. I try to leave them where they are, but they won’t stay there.
They come home with me. I think about them and hope that they will live until morning; hope that if they don’t, their sons, daughters, mothers and fathers will be able to cope with loss of their existence.
I want to be strong. I will myself to be stoic and unattached, but that lasts as long as the mist under a strong morning sunrise. I love these people. I fall in love with their families and I feel the pain, sorrow and devastation of their loss on every front.
The older I get, the more squeamish, melancholic and dramatic I become. I surely thought that I would be stronger and more able to control my emotions at this point, but the truth is that I am more susceptible to emotion and empathy than I ever thought possible.
Sometimes, things happen that are funny and yet, the humor battles sorrow for there is nothing beautiful or funny about someone who doesn’t know who they are or where they are or what they have accomplished in their lives. The emptiness is devastating. I find myself bringing people home with me in my thoughts and crying over their infirmities.
I never wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to be a photographer. I wonder sometimes if I don’t make a better nurse than a photographer. And then I realize that I can be both.
One makes me a better of the other.
I photograph for the sheer pleasure of it and yet, when photographs are forbidden, I see past what is present. I am thankful, on many levels, for the blessings bestowed upon me.
I am a nurse.
I am a photographer.
I am myself.
I am content.
What more can anyone ask than to be content in the life they are living.
I am, above all things, thankful, for the joys, the trials, the triumphs and the the lessons. Thankful for the things that hurt me and those that bring me joy.
One without the other is insubstantial; combined, they are powerful beyond the description of words.
I. Am. Blessed.
And I am thankful. The images, whether in real time or captured on film are what life is about. Life is images and images make up life.
I find myself where I am now; looking out at the Atlantic ocean as it bumps up against the Outer Banks of North Carolina. When I see myself down the road, this is where I envision my reality to be. I’ve been places; many places, but none of them call to me, in my soul like this little strip of land on the Ocean.
I find my heart soaring, my inner self singing and know that I have, in every sense of my being, come home.
Maybe in a past life, or with inherited memory, or some other cosmic force, I have been here before, living and breathing and soaring through the air. I know it as I know my own home. I feel a belonging that beckons me to stop and stay; for a while or forever.
I can see myself, years down the road, waking to the sunrise, driving to the lighthouses, watching the wild horses, singing a song that only one who lives by the sea can sing.
Tears threaten, but they are tears of peace and contentment. Sorrow is as far from me as the depths of the ocean I gaze upon.
God has given me this space of time, the peace of mind, the joy in my heart. He knows of that which I had need.
A Photographer's Heart 
