paper dolls

The path looks a lot different than it did as a kid. My perspective is different walking the two blocks from my parents' house, down the hill, through the field, into the woods, down the ravine and out onto the rocky shoreline as an adult returning home than it did as a seven year old playing runaway or a ten year old watching boys launch their BMX's off jimmy-rigged jumps on knotty dirt trails through the trees, or on the beach as a 13 year old trying to fool an 18 year old that she was a 16 year old, or as a 16 year old night-swimming in her underwear with a gaggle of girls and few lucky boys, or as an 18 year old saying goodbye to the western shore of Lake Michigan only to put down shallow roots on the coast across that lake.

My perspective of that homestretch of beach has changed, but the space has changed, too. It's much less hidden with so many of the trees now gone. The ravine is still there along the drainage route, but those BMX trails and secret forts are gone. I think a lot of the trees had died so they cleared it out. Now there's just an abbreviated corridor of forest on either side of the wide gravel path leading from the park down to the lake. It's open and inviting, offering no promises of concealment or camouflage anymore.

But it's a refuge, nonetheless.

I walked down there alone this weekend. When I step out of the trees and onto the rocks, something shifts for me. I lose my words, the wind and waves like an energy vacuum - I'm there and immediately I'm open - transparent and raw, the thoughts and prayers that float and churn inside me -- acknowledged or not -- blast out through my pores by the power of that shoreline.

That space is sacred, no doubt.

It's as if the old Me's are still there on that beach somewhere. Huddled around a makeshift bonfire of driftwood kindling ringed by stones, or standing in the woods, exhilarated and intimidated by the energy of youth and hormones, or sitting on a rock heartbroken and alone, or walking the shore with my first baby, with my boys. We're all there at once, populating the beach like little paper dolls. 

I don't go there to pray, but there's no hiding on that beach. There's magic there. There's spirit there, and when I step foot over foot on those stones that are part of something bigger, I feel myself - my soul, mind, heart - open. They open because that shoreline exposes it all.

I turn and start up the slight incline, back to the park, the street, and I'm coming out of savasana. There's a sense of peace, but of vulnerability, too. Did anyone else feel that? What else did that energy pass through? Was I naked on that beach, exposed to the world or was that really just between me and God? How could an exchange so huge, so powerful and exquisite, have transpired undetected to those around me?

I think the forest knows, holds a lot of things for a lot of people. All that gets blown up and out on that beach makes its way, wind-tossed, and catches in the trees. Those trees must hold a lot people's secrets. I know they hold mine.

But the beach is different -- open and exposed. The wind and water, the ancient stones, the lake lapping up and washing over and over and over.