The Bay crept up to the shore wearing an azure shroud.
The weight of her tears bent her head over and she wept
in wind-swept sighs against the sand.
She repeated her soft, but insistent, mantra: “Bring me no more souls.”
Souls who were lost long before they punctured her surface in their last act because they thought they were trapped in a body
Never realizing that the bottle we call a body floats in an ocean of soul.
“Bring me no more souls,” falling from bridges.
“Bring me no more souls,” bottles broken by what comes in bottles.
“Bring me no more souls,” who swim out, but not back.
“Bring me no more souls,” bottles hanging from knots of their own creation.
The bodies wash up on the shore like beach glass. Beautiful and sparkling in their brokenness and ground smooth by the constant sobbing of the bay. Driving the sharp edges against the sand with her salty tears along with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends until the pieces can be held without hurting us.
“Bring me no more souls.” And yet they are drawn to her bucolic beauty, the mother of life, the salty womb of our planet. Artists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs. All wanting to make a mark on the world when doing so is like trying to create a sculpture from water. So what do they sculpt? A graven image that they mistake for themselves.
And it is empty. Man cannot see his soul for the same reason that a fish cannot see the water it swims in. We don’t have to break our bottles to feel our soul rushing in. We need merely open them.
When the Bay says “Bring me no more souls,” she wants you to open your own Golden Gate to the mighty Pacific that opens onto every ocean of the world. Souls segregated by fear are like oceans separated by political boundaries made of nothing more substantial than ego. There is one world ocean. Listen to the Bay. There is but one soul. Be moved by its tides.
Literature in Small Doses 