On Love & Hope
Open Water Swimming, The Romantics, Our Cat Ellie & Meeting God in Florida
Part 1.
When you’re swimming in open water, you don’t have to do kick flips every 25 yards to turn around like you do in the community pool. Instead you just keep swimming and feel the water like silk in-between fingers as you press hard through it. When you’re swimming in open water and look down - which you’re doing most the time - all you can see is cloudy, mossy green. You must remind yourself not to think about what’s below this, otherwise your heart skips a beat because what about the old lake monsters looking upward through green to nibble at a bit of toe or finger?
When you’re swimming in open water, you don't have that line that runs along the bottom of a pool to direct your path, so you must depend on the person kayaking next to you to guide you to the other side. There are currents that make you feel you are swimming diagonally or too far to the right but really you are swimming in a straight line. There are waves pulling you up and dropping you down. There are strange tides that as you approach the finish line cause the water to press hard against you so you must swim your very strongest to make it at the very end.
But you do feel strong. And you do make it to the end. You’ve been training for this.
Reach into the unknown with anticipation. Hands extend into black. Who knows what may lurk in the shadows; what may nibble off a bit of toe or finger. Hope is a risky business. Hope is a dangerous thing.
Part 2.
She says it’s been a dream of hers since she was a girl to live and study Spanish in Barcelona. She has a small list of exceptional ambitions and if she doesn’t start pursuing them now, when will she ever?
Her belongings are so few they could fit into but a single room. Her sense of non-attachment I admire. We spend the day packing her bedroom into boxes and heave them up a broken ladder into the attic. Tomorrow she will take but two suitcases and lift into the sky and land in a place where people dance salsa in open air and Spanish men are tall and handsome and seafood is fresh out of the water and the air is salt and light. Her romanticism I admire: Saying yes to a dream is a romantic act.
I can see the argument for hope that the romantics take. My girlfriends who after a glass of white wine and hearing the whole story tell you it may be true love; that you have to reach out. With stars in their eyes, their hearts and bodies filled with light, remind you of those classic stories where this or that happens and the lovers get separated, but in the end realize they are meant for one another. They say even if the effort is unrequited, at least you were a champion of hope, unfettered by fear. My girlfriends who after a margarita and hearing what you’ve been up to and that you haven’t been writing, remind you of that dream you shared a year ago and that you must never stop believing because what happens when instead of following those effervescent and translucent things, we bury dreams in graves? Doesn’t a small part of us die? Don’t we all know what happens to a dream deferred?
To be a romantic - and on my best days I am one of them - is to hope; to hold fast to a dream; to reach out into that great, black unknown and do something never done before. Hope is the vehicle that transforms dreams into reality.
Part 3.
When sailing a catamaran, you learn to talk with the wind. As you become sensitive to when and how it changes, you adjust the ropes and sails to hug its movements. You curve around it until you are one with it. On the lake where the air and water are warm and sky is blue with clouds that look like small animals, you sit on a net in the middle of the small boat and by the end you are completely wet. But then comes the wind pressing hard across the water and it continues rising and you didn’t prepare for this. It pushes at you so hard you feel it might pick you up straight off the water.
Can a person choose who they fall in love with? I am not talking about the slow rolling, steady and stable type but the type that crashes into you like a tidal wave and there you are, whipped around in the thrashing, whooshing and violent water. Maybe it isn’t right to call this love. Maybe it’s better to call it limerence. Or infatuation. Or chemistry. Or lust.
This type of love - or whatever you choose to call it - is funny and it’s fickle and it’s cruel. Mostly in romantic love, one person loves the other more. Many of us flip back and forth between fleeing from the one who is available and running to the one who pushes us away. It’s a terrible but natural fact: We reject the one who wants us and want the one who doesn’t.
Romantic love does terrible things to a human. They can lose all control: the rush of hormones through the body, loss of rational thought, sleepless nights, rumination and anxiety and excitement that take over. These are only a few reasons why not everyone chooses to give in to love when she appears from behind a cloud, softly luring you in with her windy breathe that she might steal you up off ground from which you may never return.
I can see the argument for living in bleak reality; radical acceptance of and limitation to the seem realm; never setting one’s gaze higher and forever staring at the ground; never letting heat enter the heart. Hope is dangerous because what follows hope naturally is caring. And to care means to risk losing that thing cared for. I can see the resistance to hope, that otherworldly emotion, because if indulged in, hope can lift one off the ground like the catamaran who’s sails were too small and there you are swinging in air with no sense of ground at the bottom of feet; looking down with tingling fingers and toes as you imagine dropping. Which you very likely might.
Those pessimists - and on my worst day I am one of them - would say that hope is an irrational thing; that it is disassociation from reality.
Part 4.
It has been three days and we have yet to find our cat. Her name is Ellie. She is seventeen. She is mostly blind. We’ve walked through the woods in the backyard with flashlights, calling her name and whistling. Dad and my sister Grace put up posters and knocked on neighbor’s doors. But still no word. At first, I assume she will come back. She has always been an indoor-outdoor cat. I’m sure she’s hiding in the brush and ignoring our calls because finally this city cat is inside a true, natural wild. But after a few days pass I wonder if her blindness and old age have outweighed her animal instinct. Is she in fact lost, walking miles through the dense wood, hungry and tired?
In a last attempt before calling it a night, Grace and I go back again with flashlights. This time we are going to walk further than before down the wild path that runs along the creek. It’s dark and the sound of grasshoppers fills the humid air when Grace veers onto a smaller trail to the right that goes down to the creek. I hear her call. I follow after.
Down the rocks I descend and there is Ellie, lying on a large, flat rock next to the water. She is stiff, which means she had passed just earlier this afternoon. The most likely story is that she wasn’t lost at all. Instead, she found a place in the backyard next to the creek where she could sip on the water and eat insects. She did indeed ignore our calls. And after taking a final sip from the creek and dipping paws in water, she laid down for a cat nap on the hot rock, immersed in warmth from the sun and sounds of water trickling and birds.
She had green eyes and brownish grayish fur and the hair under her chin was white and the softness. We openly during the memorial in which we planted pink flowers and ferns within the bounds of some flat rocks and laid down natural daisies from the creek.
Death is the paradox of life; that all things living must die. No person can escape it, despite the level of wealth or status accumulated: It is the great equalizer. At some point, all those you love will either be taken from you or you from them. To love is to know the thing you love will only ever be ephemeral (unless you believe love extends beyond time and space which I do), but you choose it anyway. Maybe that’s part of what makes love so beautiful - it’s at once the strongest of forces while the most delicate.
Part 5.
Exiting the airport in Tarpon Springs, Florida, I’m hit with a wave of air sticky and heavy. It’s the same air that’s wearing down the fronts of buildings, painted pastel yellow or blue or orange now washed out by salt and sun. Tarpon Springs is home to a large Greek population so on the small street that lines the docks where the boats bring in sponges that are sold to sponge shops, there are Greek restaurants where you can order cheese on fire and gyros and admire the white and blue decor that reminds you of Santorini. I walk the windy, small streets at night and visit the Greek Orthodox churches and shrines speckled across the neighborhood. The Shrine for Saint Michael is filled with paintings of Jesus, Mary and Saint Michael of course. It was constructed after a woman brought back from a monastery in Greece an icon of Saint Michael, which year after year is said to make sounds and heal sick people.
It is Friday night and the Vespers service is being held at Saint Nicholas Church. Stand in line and walk in one by one and light the small, yellow wax candle to represent taking on the light of God and place it in soft sand next to the other candles that flicker in the dark. Squeeze yourself into the last spot in the back of the tiny room where the priests chant in Greek the psalms and their voices are beautiful and the candles are lit and the air is clouded with smoke from frankincense. I close my eyes and feel a feeling like a song you’ve heard before but it’s been so long you’ve forgotten the words but the melody also comes from inside you. It’s a feeling familiar yet distant yet more close than anything.
A few days later I lie on the beach under a yellow umbrella and watch the waves come in and drop away and think about the love of God and how it can transform a person. How when you feel it, it feels like that old song you’ve heard before. Orthodox monks live in caves and pray with black, knotted prayer ropes all night and day in an effort to cultivate this transcendent love. Unlike romantic love that takes over like a tidal wave without one’s asking for it, this spiritual love is to keep alive and kindling in the heart that small fire that sees the good in others and not the bad. It catches judgment and jealousy and hate as soon as they enter the mind and disposes of them. It has the power to cut through every morsel of fear and shame and tears run along your cheeks because it feels like returning home again.
I see the argument for hope and love that the Christians take. They say these are the characteristics of God himself and not self-generated by humans but gifted to the heart as one comes nearer to the divine. And I believe this to be true.
Perhaps hope isn’t the antithesis of radical acceptance, but a filter through which to see the world; a filter that offers another pigment or dimension to the mundane; an opening that allows the light in and to fall on everything. Perhaps to hope and love is to have an ideal; something to look towards; a north star. Some might say it’s to live with something a bit otherworldly. Some might say it is the character of God himself.
Part 6.
On the island in the middle of the lake are small birds that have built nests. Building a nest is not something they are taught to do but as the temperature rises and green buds appear on branches and days get longer, something wakes in them to flutter around and collect twigs in small bundles. Do they know what they are building? Do they know it’s all an effort to continue the species? It is a natural law: living things grow and seek to continue the species. Birds build nests. Plants grow towards the sun, where warmth comes from.
As I come to the close of this essay, I reflect up on these reflections and see they have been my way of working through choices I and those closest to me have been presented this summer. We are presented choices each time fate offers opportunities to reach into the black unknown; love with parts of the heart we have yet to love with; risk when relationships blossom and require hearts to be seen with greater vulnerability; hope again for the flowering of quiet dreams.
Risk is inherent in hope and love. Disappointment is inevitable. So when presented with the choice, we could hold fast to radical realism, rejecting hope as a temporal defense mechanism. We could close the sunroof of our hearts to the light and stay safe as smaller versions of ourselves, hiding and hindered in shadows, but are we not like plants that sustain on light? Aren’t hope and love natural, human acts? Wouldn’t our hearts like plants that grow upward towards the sun shrivel and suffocate without it?
At the very least, they are courageous acts. And I am not sure one can grow without taking courageous acts. I think I’d like to grow.
Thank you of reading. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider liking and commenting on the post directly on the Substack website. This type of engagement really helps me grow my platform and gain traction as an author.
Some people have had difficulty liking and commenting. If you are not logged into Substack with your email address and password, it will not store your interactions. So please make sure you log in first.
Lastly, I will be reading excerpts from this article on my Instagram. Feel free to catch my video readings there.
Sincerely,
Emily
I feel like I’ve subconsciously been waiting for a new Homecoming post, so this is right on time. Thank you for sharing, Em. Sorry to hear about your cat. 🫶