my compass

 A year ago, near the beginning of this journey, I attended the funeral of an amazing mentor, an amazing man. His son read a poem  by W. H. Auden that has haunted me all year:                          
                                 He was my North, my South my East and West,
                                 My working week and my Sunday rest,
                                 My noon, my midnight my talk, my song,
                                 I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

Most of us start life with the wisdom of our elders acting as a compass, a timepiece, a directional beacon. But at some point this we move beyond the reach of this wisdom and must search for lighthouses on other shores. We find them, rest in the new harbor, and move on again. 

Through my life I have had two lighthouses calling me to distant shores. The first was the voices, the songs in my head that pushed me to move on, walk on, take leaps, find my courage in the face of new challenges. They sang to me, cajoled me, tempted me, hounded me...and then fell silent after my Bat Mitzvah. 

I was happy at first, thinking that I had achieved some goal, reached some destination and had placated whatever haunted me. And then I missed them. Without that prodding I felt spiritually adrift and tried a bit of everything, looking for something that would fit, something that would aerate my heart and let my soul shine through. I wanted to remember all the things that I had never known, but resonated with, but the voices were not there to guide me.

And then one day, quite my accident, I heard the song of a distant lighthouse, the echo of a rhythm that I recognized. The voices were not gone, I had just not recognized them. They sang in the surf of the sea. I could hear them best it seemed in Santa Barbara, but then I went to Israel and put my feet in the Mediterranean sea, and I could feel them wrap around me, encasing me with the song and dance and tapestry. For the first time in my life, the voices moved into me, and became that still small voice that I had been searching for. 

Sometimes though the world around me becomes very loud. There are demands and challenges, distractions and emergencies, and the ways that destinies collide and overlap and weave together. And I would forget that the compass now lived in me, that I could hear my north and south and east and west beating quietly, just beyond the noise.

I have found the perfect cure for disconnection...in the words of the great poet Jimmy Buffet...a holiday. A trip to the sea. Almost any sea, any shore, where I can walk and listen and realign.

Of course...there really is something magic about Santa Barbara.