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.
we open ourselves up for things that maybe, if we weren’t human, we wouldn’t otherwise know.
We open ourselves up to disappointment.
To hurt.
To humiliation.
To joy.
To love.
To faith and friendship.
To knowledge.
To trust.
These are all part of what makes us human. Trusting, loving and relying on other humans as we try our best to make our way along this journey is part of the process.
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, what we feel, what we believe, where we put our faith … that is what is important.
People will let us down because at the core, we are are human.
None of us are perfect and none of us can be trusted implicitly.
I find myself realizing for the hundredth time how foolish I was.
It won’t make any difference the next time.
I will trust and put my faith in humans knowing in advance that it could very well be a mistake.
But we are fallible.
It is ok to be wrong.
It happens sometimes.
Being wrong about someone isn’t the end of the world.
Yes, we will cry and cry and cry. Or at least I will.
Crying and throwing breakable things is how I best deal with disappointments. However, until I replenish my breakable stash, crying is my most appealing option.
Nothing wrong with crying when you realize you were foolish.
But if crying is all you do, then you never move past being foolish and if you never move past being foolish, then you didn’t learn a thing.
Learn something and move on.
People will sometimes let you down.
That is part of the whole human thing and just as we have been disappointed, we will disappoint others.
It is a circle … imperfect and yet a circle just the same.
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 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 