The Point

“The point was not those 2000 people. They’re dead now. The point was what they did so that we, as a humanity, can continue to progress.”

****

“What am I doing here?” I breathed, staring more blankly than ever at the monthly report. Every so often I answer myself and believe that I’m here for a good reason. Today I could neither answer nor believe.

Thank God for mamas and cell phones.

****

The craggy, black sea rock was dispatching a dull throb through my lower back and making my legs numb. I pulled my legs closer to my sweating self, reminiscing about a time a few months before of sitting on a rock in the cold spring night, surrounded by a hazy moonlit valley and friends chanting and thinking and Poplars that crackled with the breezes. Before me was an ocean so blue I was sure someone had accidentally spilled all the cerulean tempera paint in the world and disguised their mishap with a name, “Caribbean Ocean.” “The Point,” they call the rocky jut of land that peaks out like a thumb from Magen’s Bay. I felt it was at once the point of land, the peninsula, of the northern part of the island that reached longingly to Africa and a point on a map of the Caribbean Islands; no more than a dot in time and space.

“Everything is created twice—first in the mind, then in reality.” –Unknown

In between readings, Jahweh, Nasim, and I paused to glance once more at that blue horizon so faded by distance it was impossibly a real line. What does it mean to transform? to be transformed? How do you push hard enough without being fanatical yet avoid a paralyzing sense of complacency? How do we cope with struggle invariably married to transformation? As we posed these questions to the splashing surf below, a ginger painted butterfly swept the silence together under its wings. I pressed the colored pencil harder into my drawing and hoped for answers to spring from its trail.

****

Again we called Melissa and again there was no answer. Again we stopped by Ada to find the white metal panels of her front door rotated shut. Again we spent an afternoon at home looking through our notes in our books, trying to maintain focus, fighting sleepiness. Again I asked myself, what am I doing here?

****

I’m trying to remember the exact shape of each snowflake last winter. Actually I can’t. The snowflakes looked more like ivory sheets covering my car, the cats, the pine needles.

****

Here at the sea, all the drops in the ocean look more like a giant mass of rolling water, shifting like a rocking chair grandfather, perhaps with a map of checkers spread in front of it, resting easily on a half-eaten lunch. To distinguish these drops would be like trying to distinguish all the thoughts in the day. Instead I marvel at the buoyancy the drops together contain, the life they harbor, the vastness they sweep. Again I ask myself, “What am I doing here?” Only this time I know it’s because I’m just a drop in a big huge mess of water, at the point of some peninsula, a speck in eternity, a small bit of a bigger plan requiring that all the pieces work together so that one day, somehow, even miraculously, an ocean can form.