Wild encounter with the sublime

Bearing up in a storm

Sunrise on Trappe Creek

Happy Memorial Day to my fellow Americans. Hope you’re enjoying the beginning of summer.¹ Today’s short essay about a wild encounter is my response to

Holly Starley

’s invitation to the

Caravan Writers Collective

writing challenge. Enjoy!

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It hailed me

I’m with my husband on a thirty-four foot sailboat in a gale. I’ve been aboard a sailboat maybe six times at this point. Steering into the wind and crashing down the waves is utterly consuming, the word afraid no match for what I am feeling. Wrenched from all that I know, I am beyond fear, beyond any namable emotion. I focus on my job to point the boat into the wind while he attempts to repair the broken mainsheet block. Immersed in the drama, the surreal darkness in daytime, the deafening wind, the cold rain and spray, the extreme motion of the boat as the bow slams repeatedly into the water, I do my job. I stay focused.

And then.

We break free of time. The storm raises its skirts to reveal a luminous yellow glow around the entire horizon. The wind and rain seem to halt. I shimmer with energy, suffused in glowing calm, full, complete, one with it all. The world, not just the Bay, is entirely round and gold and glowing with me in it, a newborn crab in the palm of a vast hand.

So integral a part of it, no longer in my body, I am the Bay, the sky, the world, the golden light; I am all of it and none of it. Bathed in the certainty of this love, I begin to weep with joy. The electric charge in my body hums on and on.

Events like this defy attempts to name or describe. This is not a topic that can be known, analyzed, picked apart, turned into a neat story. Believe me, I have tried. How does one net a liquid living light, or contain the energy that drives the universe? It doesn’t want me to tell stories. It wants me to let go and be ravished.

Tilting within myself

Hearing Marie Howe’s poem, “Annunciation,” for the first time moved me to tears. How can a single poem of ninety-six words elicit the same response as this wild encounter with a storm?²

Annunciation, by Marie Howe

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does –

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

I was blinded like that

Rare as this was, touching other realities has always been part of human experience. Through attention and presence, the artist courts the secrets hidden beneath the material of the everyday. A poet might seek to describe something quite ordinary, say, the sound of rain striking leaves. A painter might accept an invitation to touch transcendence, beguiled by a column of water in an orange plastic water bottle, or sunlight heralding planetary movement, or energy shimmering from a stormy horizon. Like all art, Howe’s poem arises from the luminous wholeness behind our fragmented world.

Being no one

My fascination with what happened on that sailboat is a distraction. Reason would rewrite it as a trick of terror, the chemical response of survival instinct. Marie Howe’s poem saved me from this desecration. The last lines flung me right back there, bathing in the dangerous pure love of belonging, the light of being chosen. Chosen to know that I am made of this. Chosen to know that every living being here with me is made of this. I wept bathing in light, I wept hearing Howe’s incantation, and I weep now, tasting the defiant ecstasy of enchantment.

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What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

Read Holly’s riveting post that inspired this response:

One Woman's Gaping Maw

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Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International. For The Earth And All Generations - Women Are Rising For Climate Justice & Community-Led Solutions. Track past and current recipients here.

1. The day itself is a time to reflect and be grateful to those who have served and sacrificed for our country’s ideals.

2. Listen to Marie Howe’s reading of this poem here.