#25 Something Like Holiness

Exploring, exploiting, and the sharks in between

In 2019, Jenny and Rose started writing to each other about creativity, sobriety, and relationships. In P.S. Draft in Progress, we’re inviting you to pull up a chair and join our (very human, always AI-free) correspondence.

A line from your last letter has hummed in my mind all week: O has a foxhound’s nose for emotional nuance, which she uses to make the world softer for others. What a beautiful thing to say and, I imagine, an even more beautiful thing for O to hear. I’m happy you two found each other. Any chance you’re accepting applications for a third wheel? Yep—it’s me…I want to be the third wheel.

As you know, I went from 10 blissful days of camping in the Keys to a 9-hour drive home to two very intense days of work. It’s now 7:30 pm, and I’ve done what any sensible woman would do—threw off my work flats, ate a bag of potato chips in the grass, poured a large cup of coffee, and sat down to write you back.

My son used this gap-toothed bridge to explain open circuits to me

You asked about the friends I made on my vacation and I’m basically bursting at the seams to tell you everything. But first, I need to share a passage from the book my husband, B, recently read. It’ll make sense in a minute:

The trajectory of adulthood is toward ever greater efficiency, narrower focus, and well-worn routines that make each day more and more similar to the last. Exploration is the antihabit, the antidote to a diminished palette of life choices. ― Alex Hutchinson, The Explorer’s Gene

I love a good routine, but a diminished palette of life choices? Oof—that’s a gut punch. Because, I also really love color. And as B and I prepped for our trip and packed the camper to the brim, our conversations centered heavily on exploiting versus exploring.

The former is doing the same thing over and over again because it’s easy and familiar—ordering the same thing at the same restaurant while sitting in the same booth. The latter implies expansion and adventure and a willingness to veer from the comfort zone. It carries risk, but often, reward.

Holy Palette, Mother Nature!

We’ve already camped at Bahia Honda State Park 7 times, and while checking the tire pressure and securing our sewer cart to the back of the trailer, B was really pushing my buttons. Maybe we should go somewhere new next summer? I mean…we’re being total exploiters, he said. I’m not sure why, but my hackles rose. I defended our tradition like a rabid mama bear. But we LOVE Bahia Honda and consistency is important for children. Growl. Hiss.

And here’s the thing—my family has traveled to some remarkable places. We know the fire of NEW. And we also know the pressure. When you invest the time and money to explore in the traditional sense, there will be moments of awe and exhilaration alongside moments of utter exhaustion and overwhelm. When EVERYTHING is undiscovered, there’s a sense of obligation to fill each minute to the brim.

At Bahia Honda, we slow down and zoom in. After a day of letting the knots in our necks untie themselves, we fall into our steady island rhythm. The first thing I noticed this year? I forgot about my guided morning meditation. Instead, B and I woke daily to watch the sunrise. We sipped coffee and slapped at noseeums and felt something close to holiness as the horizon flushed pink.

Enormous Smallness

Then, the boys set off on their daily run as I biked to my most exploited spaces around the park—the rock jetty with schools of parrot fish feeding at its base. Peace Point where I constructed our annual cairn. The Secret Reef where a moray eel once gave me the side-eye and an angel fish proposed. And my writing nook with a picnic table and views of the ocean’s impossible blues. Lovely and familiar, yet, somehow new.

At the jetty, the park had erected a HUGE Gulf of America sign. It made me want to barf, so instead, I pulled the small notepad from my pocket and wrote a haiku about it. At Peace Point, the tide was so high that I had to slosh through portions of the thin path to make my way to the rocks. What if the water consumes it all? I mused, and promptly decided I’d transform into a manatee and be very, very happy. I’m not sure how long this fantasy lasted, but the resulting sunburn required aloe intervention.

My Secret Reef was ribboned in thousands of glass minnows, darting in unison when the tarpon splashed nearby. Hello there, nice to meet you, I whispered. And instead of the usual Jamaican curly-tailed lizard flexing on the fence of my writing nook, I encountered a petulant teenage iguana. We won’t discuss the comparisons he made between our necks.

In hindsight, we’ve experienced novelty on every single visit to the park. One year, T and I collected more than 70 hermit crabs of all shapes and sizes at the outcropping of rocks beside our site. We took the one in the biggest, gnarliest shell and coined him General. We lined them up in rows and watched as leaders and followers and deserters made themselves known.

Eager to replicate (fine…exploit) the magic the following year, we headed straight to their home. Inexplicably, they were GONE, forcing us to explore in the opposite direction. We made our way to an otherworldly sandbar—the glassy ocean like watercolor smears of turquoise and green. The seagrass lined sandy pathways and we waded through the shallows as schools of fish split around our waists.

This year, the sargassum seaweed blanketed the rocks in front of our site so we ventured further to some unfamiliar limestone formations. The boulders bore imprints of ancient corals, like grey mazes for the snails. Small tide-pools formed in all directions and we spent hours investigating, no—EXPLORING, the multitudes they carried.

One evening, a small nurse shark swam past my toes and began feeding along the critter infested shore. This was no helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. It was better than that. The enormous smallness took my breath away.

Night after night, we returned to the rocks. Inventoried countless baby sharks, bivalves, whelks, crabs and anemones, stuffed our pockets with shells and marveled, How are we just now discovering this?

Me desperately grasping for my 13-year old. No subtext whatsoever.

As we moved through our trip, B quietly stepped off his soapbox and joined me for my evenings in the tide-pools. Holding hands, walking back to the camper one evening, I glanced at him. This was the best date of my life, I proclaimed. And I meant it. Never one to gush, he smiled softly and said, Mine too.

The evidence is strong—exploring and exploiting is not an either/or. The mundane does not have to be a diminished palette of life choices. It’s simply wonder in disguise. When we slow down and pay attention, anything can become new—a tidepool, a marriage—anything.

P.S. Your last letter piqued my curiosity around young Rose. Please tell me more about what made her tick?

P.P.S. When we returned from our trip, T dove headfirst into an unexpected project…crafting tiny airplanes from seltzer cans. The good news? He will have no shortage of supplies. The bad news? There isn’t any. My son is obsessively making things. My work here is done.

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