It’s now past 1AM.
I was just out on the deck, soaking in the atmosphere.
Look, I know, I’ve been over this and over this, every time we make it back to our seaside haven in Nova Scotia’s wonderful Mahone Bay. Every time I write the same sort of thing. I don’t mean to be tiresome, but still, I can’t help but express it all again, as I try over and over to get it right; I keep making the attempt, but I always feel I’ve come up short, because it’s not merely beyond my poor power of description, it’s actually, I think, beyond the limits of rational comprehension just how beautiful and soothing this place always seems to me as the clock ticks toward midnight and beyond. It’s not about logic or reason.
When I’m here, up alone late at night, I often find myself looking out over the water and wondering why the mere sight of the ocean in the wee hours affects me like some sort of anti-depressant drug. What’s the objective explanation? Why is this the most comforting environment I’ve ever inhabited? Why does the light reflecting off the pitch-black sea in the early morning hours induce feelings of utterly unperturbed serenity? I think there’s something primordial and instinctual about the way all the ancient psychic buttons are pushed by the scene that now surrounds me. Looking out over the lights reflecting off the mildly rippling waves in the bay, with nothing stirring anywhere, it feels as if this is how it was always meant to be, as if human consciousness never quite evolved to cope with the modern, complex, noisy, mechanized world we’ve created, and it’s only at moments like this, moments of respite from all we’ve done to complicate our lives, when a weary soul experiences the emotional peace that living things were meant to derive from the natural world that was supposed to surround them. We were meant to know silence. We were meant to find solace in the hours when there’s nothing more to be done, and nothing to be faced tomorrow that we haven’t handled thousands of times already. We weren’t built to conquer challenge after novel challenge, to learn new skills every other day, or adjust repeatedly to radical changes in the way we live our lives, year on year. We were meant to seek equilibrium. To simply be.
If some sort of paradise awaits the righteous in the realm beyond, it can’t possibly offer anything more soothing or soul-nourishing than the view from my deck at this moment. It was a humid, rainy, and punishingly hot day today. Now, the cool ocean breeze has pushed out the sweltering air, and everything feels as if it’s climate-controlled. The bright lights of the famous three churches reflect in the placid waters of the bay. There isn’t a sound, not even of distant traffic, or of ducks settling in for the night. The machines that make a racket are all dormant. The noisy primates are all asleep. Every creature great and small is tucked soundly into its own version of a comfy bed, stacking Zs. All is calm, quiet, and reassuring. Nothing, not a single thing, is wrong.
I don’t require anything else. All I need is this:
the needlefish 