Roaring

By: Edward Viljoen on Friday, January 11, 2008

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Last night I had dinner with a friend who knew me when I was 16 years old. The picture is taken on our trip over the mountain to camps bay where we ate in the trendy, ever popular beach front area where diners can watch the sun set and the moon rise through palm trees accompanied by gentle roar of the ocean.

This is Lion's Head, a jutting, fierce mountain in cape town that roars out over the ocean and city and sky and gives launch to parasailing adventurers who land slow motion and elegant on the beaches. (The don't look too elegant tho when they meet the sand - yikes.)

We talked about lost friends, events that shaped us as young men, parents, choices and memorials, first loves, tragic loves, murders, deaths, jobs, careers, suicides, favors secret societies and kindnesses, soap operas and nations and inside me there there is another kind of roaring. This big, gigantic life. It's so huge. Powerful. Roaring.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living my life just there in the roar where the surf breaks white and dramatic and beautiful or out there where it smashes up against the rocks and nothing can hold onto nowhere for long -- and there goes that floating seaweed, it would have been nice to hold on to it for a while.

And sometimes I feel like my life is deeper down, like a scene from an oceanic documentary - under the foamy frenzy in this quiet that comes when I'm still with all my wantings and let them unravel themselves.

It's always the same - the only thing available is to be still with what is happening. It will be gone soon anyway and its best not to miss the portion here in front of me.. Eat the fancy desert, every single expensive strand. Drink the nutty, wide eyed Chardonnay, listen, listen, listen, love. Inside me there is this roaring. This big, gigantic life. It's so huge. Powerful. Roaring. Sometimes I think if I don't sit still and be quiet I will explode.

I am remembering two ideas from a movie on the flight: happiness does not come primarily from human interaction. Later, tho, the character who expresses this idea writes something like "Happiness is not entirely real unless shared."
I will have to think about both of these ideas. I am not sure of either of them. And like the character, I am trying to understand happiness and why love is like an ocean.

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