I’ve been in a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay as Neal, an experienced sailor, stood it up on its side so my husband and I could hang over the edge. I’d wondered, “Was I foolish?”
I’ve sat on the huge, shoreline rocks of Marblehead watching children’s sailing classes tack out to the meeting point. Warm sun. Clear blue sky. Feeling happy listening to the Atlantic rolling in. Tanned feet pointed at the breakers.
And on the Charles River, next to my brother in a sailboat used for lessons, I followed his wife passing us up and back, as she kept coming about before us.
One summer, visiting in America, I had a moment of truth, understanding I wouldn’t be going to the beach in the coming years as freely as I had with my family. So I bought a two-dollar bath mat picturing two lighthouses, one with red stripes, on an ocean inlet curving around sandy spits of land, where a two-story white house looked out to sea and sailboats empty of sailors (like spirit sailboats), tacked into the wind. Framed in warm brown, it hangs in my kitchen in India, quelling my beach-longing, comforting, tapping my inner happiness.*
Our bodies are like the spirit sailboats—our souls being the invisible sailors. The soul enters our body when we are in the womb and leaves when we physically die. It returns to the one eternal soul, entering a new body, over and over.
My realization is, “We live the reality we know, the body, permeated with the reality we don’t know, the spirit. What appears real, the body, isn’t; but spirit invisibly is.”
*A Flower for God