Mari Messer - Shore Lines: Reflections Beside the Wide Water

Y ear after year I return to the seabeach to hunt for treasure that can be captured in words and packed along with damp beach towels and faded sunhat to bring home. As tools, I use only a fast-flowing pen and a spiral notebook with a sea scene on the cover. Most of the regulars where I stay have become used to seeing me, alone under the eaves, writing. I'm a fixture like the blue heron standing ankle deep in shallow water, staring out to sea, left to wade in unbothered solitude.

The things I write about happen in the subtle space between everyday life and imaginal life, between beach and sea. I write as everyone's resident solitary, and no one ever asks me what I'm putting down. To those around me, I've become as familiar as the fisherman, sitting on his stool at water's edge, casting.

Writers are like wind-up toys. Set us down anywhere and we begin to scribble. Many of us, you'll notice, scribble better near water. John Masefield, Annie Dillard, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Tolstoy,Hemingway, Thoreau, all revered the Big Water. They are not alone. Like beached hermit crabs naked in the sun, most of us crave water.

In the absence of Big Water, any water will do. Water invites solitary reflection. On a closet shelf, I've stored stacks of journals written in watery places: river, fountain, quarry, lake. The notebooks literally drip with wateriness. Over time, I've filled a heap of notebooks with sea stories written at different times and in different places along a hundred-mile stretch of Florida Gulf Coast. They were composed on-the-spot, largely as an attempt to preserve the experience. But mostly these stories were put down as a way to enter solitude and save in some way a drop or two of seawater to bring home.

Even when these notebooks began to pile high, I had no notion that they would ever see life beyond their handwritten pages. But one day my friend, Karen, who had injured her leg and now hobbled around with a cast, called to say she couldn't get out and wanted company. Would I bring something to read to her as she reclined, foot up, to listen? I would. I'd just returned from a trip where I'd filled a whole new notebook, and I was eager to read. We sat on her deck in the cool shade of poplars and maples, and Iread to the cadence of a stream burbling below. Afterward, Karen said, You ought to do something with these stories. Later I shared the writings with others and they agreed.

That's how Shore Lines came to be. In the pages that follow, you're invited to join me in a sabbatical by the sea, a deep dive for sunken treasure that interweaves myth, fact, and moment-to-moment experience of the seabeach. I hope these sea stories will stir your wonderings and rememberings, and inspire you to explore your own inner sea-space.

To some, taking time for reflection may seem like selfish indulgence in the uncertainty and upheaval of today's frenetic, fast-moving world. But perhaps now, more than ever, we need just such a respite, a chance to restore balance and clarity, refresh, renew, and look more closely and with jolly good humor at ourselves and our world. We need to go apart when there's danger we may come apart.

If you can't get to the sea, I urge you to sit beside a fountain in a park; seek out a river, a lake, even a puddle for your reflection. Or simply come along on an imaginal sojourn beside the sea as you read these pages. Go deep. Fling your fishing line wide and let the hook go down. When you feel a tug, pullup the line to net some surprising new shimmery thing you've never seen before. Something to bring back to your everyday life when your time by the sea is over.