Most Changing. Ever Constant.

As a writer most of what I write forms inside of me easily. But it is also very much shaped by outside influences I pass by or experience.

One of my biggest writing inspirations would be where the ocean meets the sand…where the wave washes away a clean slate. Where they smooth and sooth the roughness.

Complete metaphors for life.

When I lived on the island for six years and as often as I can now in full-time travel, I love meeting the angry ocean. The storm ocean. Pre-Storm, during storm…and especially the after storm.

Living within a walk of this for six years I fully took every chance I could to greet this. To take this time to meditate. To soak it in. the fill up on the power of it. And to release whatever was inside of me needing to be washed away by the waves.

There is something truly magical in the ocean, the waters, the storms and the skies, but combined where they meet…ever more so.

When I stood on a beach during lightning (granted, not the smartest moment, though the lightning was far off) at the age of mid-teen just emerging from realization that I truly was living a bad childhood and a hard life, I allowed myself a true wretched good cry. A cry for my childhood lost for what little there had been. For the childhood stolen from me. And for entering the womanhood I knew was ahead.

The day I left my husband I had walked my dogs down to an after storm beach thinking along the way that what I’d just learned was really really bad. And very very life changing. I was afraid to voice even inside of my thoughts what that life changing would mean. I saw the biggest after storm silver lining as I walked across the rain wet sand and I just breathed a sigh of relief and felt “It’s going to be ok”. Little did I know it would get worse and I had even MORE reason to leave (and did, running out literally for my life) soon after I returned the same day when he tried to kill me but in the end that silver lining and that sigh of “it will be ok” stuck in my mind through it all.

There was a night in my life that Mardi Gras had me waking at dawn on the West end about eight miles from my home. I also somehow didn’t have my purse or money and wearing nothing but a very slip of a dress and my boots which I carried, I woke at dawn and walked the length of the beach to my home on the far East End. The entire time the storm that raged was knocking me flat on my butt. The lightning was scary but the rain so driving I could barely see it. I walked near enough the waters edge were the sand was packed harder barefoot with my cellphone hiding in my boots held in my hand. By the time I got home, wading through thigh high water once I exited the beach I was soaked to the bone, it was March and not hot at all but thankfully decently warm weather. My dress clung to me. But the entire time walking through that storm was just…power. The fun is that there is so much more to this story to be revealed in writings in the future. But that moment of just me and the ocean and the storm in dawn hours…filled me.

There is just simply something about it. And that is a power that my soul seems to feed off of.

The island and the beach and the Gulf of Mexico and where the water meets the shore and the storms we all survive that also leave everything new and fresh…even if we have to clean up after a disaster first, just seem…alive. And all of this highly inspired my writing of Behind The White Gate.

Soundtrack for BTWG: BTWG SoundTrack.  Muddy Waters.