Dancing on the Ship

Any writer worth their salt knows and loves bird by bird. Anne Lamott is a deLIGHT. I love her. Anyway, here is a remarkable quote from that beyond remarkable little book:

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

I love this. I love this especially because of the bit about singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. I have actually done that. And it was/is exhilarating. When I was in my early teen years, my mom took three of my sisters and I on a reenactment journey commemorating the immigration of a religious group of Europeans to America. We signed up for one leg of the trip. Oslo, Norway to Hamburg, Germany. It was three days on the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, a three-masted barque rigged sail training vessel. Basically exactly like what the immigrants would have crossed the ocean on. We were put into groups and we all had four hour watches at the different stations to help the crew. On our second night aboard the ship, there was a huge storm with twenty and thirty foot waves. The group of teens who had quickly become fast friends went out on the deck and sang and danced into the wind and rain. I had never felt so alive. We’d jump in the air just as a swell took the boat downwards so our descent was double what we had jumped. We did this until the crew came and told us that the captain said we had to get below pronto for our own safety.

The storm continued to get worse and I eventually became horribly seasick like most everyone else on the boat (there was a lot of vomit to clean up the next day), but I’ll never forget how it felt when we stood facing the storm and sang and danced our young hearts out. In that moment of recklessness I felt connected to something solid and bigger than myself. In that moment, the perfect absurdity of life fed my soul in a way that made me more myself than I had been before. A small part of me will always be there. Leaping into the air just as the next swell comes.