My friendships on Martha’s Vineyard are unlike anywhere else in my experience.  It is the shared leap across the water, the choosing to live surrounded by the sea, away from the ordinariness of the mainland that connects us like blood.  During this visit, each person that I have seen – old friends, acquaintances, close, distant – have had a quick and immediate velocity and heat, as if during my six years away, those relationships had been steeping, deepening their colors, reddening like the Aquinnah cliffs as the sea rubs away the layers, bringing out what lies beneath. I feel welcomed, held, savored, again and again.

From the moment I arrived on the island in 1992, I felt at home.  I can remember awakening the first morning that I slept in my little room at The Yard, looking out at a thrush perched at the top of a cypress tree waving in the morning ocean mist, feeling that I had landed on the planet for the first time.  I had been wandering and now I was home.

Pam, Chandrika and I are spending a week here with Jo-Ann and Derrill, the godparents of our daughters, and their son Jacob, our godson.  I feel wrapped in something holy and firm –  fine as sand and solid as stone, irresistible as the sea.  Island love.

To leave the island required me to make myself cold to it, to distance myself from it in a way that was painful and harsh.  I said we were sick of the ferry, the schedules, the mad rush to make the boat, the sameness of the roads, the incestuousness of a small community bound by the sea.  Six years later, I am finally letting the blood flow back into that amputated limb, the breath come back into my body.

I wonder where else have I done this kind of severing.  What else have I exiled, pushed away?  Am I doing that now with the home that we are selling?  Do I need to shut off feeling to make transition less painful?  I can learn something here:  a different way of moving through change – by opening my heart fully, letting the wind blow through my pores, loving what I am leaving even as I push into the next chapter.

As I write I can hear the waves beating the Aquinnah shore. This morning, the sea was high and wild, thick with seaweed and surge from the storm that blew through last night.  It is like the beating of my heart, connecting me to everything – the past the present, the unknowable future – to this single, precious moment.