my endless sea

I just need to begin.

To begin.

Now.

This blog is called Notes From an Endless Sea.  But here I sit, landlocked … no sea in sight … a coastal mountain range, a fertile expanse of valley and a tumbling of foothills to my West and 2800 vast miles of continent to my East!

What I have discovered is that ‘endless sea’ really is metaphor for that well of inspiration that we each find our own ways to draw from, and for me, a well that is most certainly made more tangible by sense of  ‘place’.

Sometimes it is the south fork of our Mother Yuba River, here in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California –– Mother Yuba, with her cleansing waters pouring ‘round sun warmed, rounded granite boulders, welcoming us all, “lie down” she whispers while she takes our troubles from us and offers them to the ocean … sometimes it is the Glastonbury Tor, that first glimpse when coming upon it on a hedge shaded, sheep cluttered lane in the English countryside – an otherworldly vision always accompanied by a gasp of wondrous awe … the Chalice Well, too, into which I once peered and saw myself, thousands of years ago, and heard the voices of a hundred women, singing … or laying with my daughter in the heather and gorse within a prehistoric stone circle surely touched by Brigid, deep in the Dartmoor wilderness, surrounded by the wild ponies … some days it is simply a deep blue sky pocked with white upon white popcorn clouds, all washed with a broad stroke of diaphanous morning orange …  always, always look up!!   … or when I lay my cheek on the red mare’s soft neck and feel her magic shooting deep into the earth, grounding me as I listen to her fluttering sigh … or even the moments like –– just now –– when my Djuna Cupcake, the black lab and border collie of my waking dreams, my sweet goofy heart of hearts runs up to me wearing a huge waggy grin with a wad of my underwear hanging from his mouth (well, that I will explain at a later date).  Laughter, peace, beauty, awe, depth … and more,  they touch, they percolate, they brew and stew and turn into magic, into epiphany –– they are inspiration.  One way or another.

Mostly, my ‘endless sea’ is indeed an endless sea and all of the blessed moments spent at her shore embraced by her calm as I gaze out over waters of cerulean glass from the shade of one of Athena’s olives, or from the prow of an elegant old blue and white fishing caique … into a horizon borne of myth and medusa, Goddess and God, the ancient mariners and the marriage of sun and earth and sky.  Breathing in the peace, breathing out a sometimes-writhing cacophony of thought, breathing out politics and all that bodes of ill in the world.  And breathing in –– again –– peace. The Aegean Sea.  Pure Magic. My literal Endless Sea, gently letting me empty so that I may fill, and begin again …

All of it, the home of my Muse.

So that endless sea has everything to do with the whys of my attempting to begin this blog … it is all of that inspiration that conceived, gestated, nurtured and then allowed me to birth my first novel, All the Little Graces.

I dedicate this space to beauty, to sweetness, to dog pads and cat fur, breathing in the green of spring and the red of heart, to Grecian journeys and far away friends and all of the homeless and weary creatures I meet along my way.  And to my book!

You Need A Blog, they said – Ok – so here it begins.

Welcome to My Endless Sea and all of her notes.

Where is your endless sea?