Hurricane Moon

I’m a DreamTraveler.  I believe, to be happy, we have to recreate ourselves, maybe not every day but two or three times a year and many times in a decade.  That’s what makes life an adventure.

Sometimes I can’t wait to try something new. Other times the last thing I want to do is test a new path. I’m frozen.  Stuck.  But life can often force us into a new niche.  Looking back, I’m usually glad I took the first step and moved on.  The characters in my stories are too.

My writing is usually about trying new paths, reinventing our lives, a bit at a time.  We concoct a dream or set a goal or need to escape--and we go for it!  Sometimes the results are not what we expected, but we adjust, make a turn, finesse our way through the disappointments, confusion, the good stuff and the hard stuff, but in the end, we GROW and the end result is a new dimension of ourselves.

Case in point:   I love to travel, but recently my husband wanted to go on a trans-Atlantic cruise. I got out a map and took one look at the vast oceans we were going to cross and got VERY COLD feet.  We would start in Amsterdam, then go to Norway, and eventually cross the Atlantic Ocean, stopping in Iceland and Greenland, then complete our journey by reaching northern Canada, and finally disembark in New York. 

Though I was nervous, in the end we booked the trip, leaving on August 29^th. But to make matters even more scary, after we left Norway, not one but THREE hurricanes began following our Holland America ship.  Their names were Rick, Leslie & Michael—thank God, Sandy hadn’t slammed her way up the coast yet!   The captain kept assuring us that all of his weather data showed he could outrun Hurricane Rick, but despite the ships’ stabilizers which minimize rocking on the waves, he warned that the storm might affect our sleep on one particular night. 

Well, I was MORE than nervous that night. Even though I’m a deep sleeper I woke up at2 a.m. But the ship wasn’t rocking too badly so I sat very close to my husband and took a look at the angry sea outside.  I’d never seen anything like those towering, furious waves. Yes, it was VERY frightening. Then he put his arm around me and pointed up to the sky and we glimpsed, amazingly, a full moon, shining down on the stormy seas.  What a Gift! Then the moon disappeared, but after several moments of complete darkness, there it was again. He nudged me and said, “You should write a poem about this.”  So I did.

Image by prozac1, courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

             Hurricane Moon

Haloed white moon

     piercing hurricane clouds

     that wisk and wail over

     waves swooping up and

     rocking ships at sea.

Despite the fright of warnings

     and the bobbing havoc

     tormenting lives,

     the white moon glimmers

     midst shifting mists and roiling waves.

Gleaming intermittently, like the

     mysterious and relentless force

     that moves us all,

     inside and underneath  the vagaries

     and unexpected weather

     of our days.