THE FEED

Everyone has a story. It’s that realization alone that connects us to the rest of the world.

Driftwood doesn’t wallow in the sorrow of once having been a majestic tree.
Or wither away after years of battering by the sea.

Instead it shimmers silver, hard as steel in the sunlight, rebuilding dunes, protecting seabirds and homes, simply by existing, still, silent, basking in what its become through no credit or fault of its own.

Gnarled limbs sculpted and smooth, weathered and worn, cracked and broken, simultaneously grotesque and beautiful
exactly as we all are
in the moments we’re most honest
with ourselves.

Heavy, like wet snow, like lead. 
Light, like birdsongs, like dandelion puffs.
There were years I couldn’t bring myself to drive back into Springs.
I had left that person behind. But healing brings us back to ourselves.

Right on Gerard, past boulders and marshes, houses on stilts, the wounded heart finds peace. There used to be an old dilapidated boat in the grass — Popeyes boat. I thought it would be there forever. But places change. Even the ones that don't change, still do. 

Back down Fireplace, left at Ashawagh.

In the early 80s my brother and our friend Josiah convinced all the locals at the General Store that there was an alligator in Pussy’s Pond. A story that somehow made it into the East Hampton Star, back when we still had that small town vibe.

Left on Shipyard, pause, left on Landing, pause … Louse, Barnes, Alberts, Little Alberts, Fresh Pond, Devon … a flood of memories, joy, loss, shame, beauty. Each space framed by sand and salt tides in a cleansing ritual for misspent youth and tragedy.

Recovered into glinting sunlight and quantum entanglement.

Within loss is finding, after death is new life. Salt heals. We are all one. 

In loving memory of Josiah Hammer 1977 - 2012

The most deeply beautiful things are the menacing darknesses, soft underbellies, translucent pulse points, violet scars.

To fall in love with the forest is to fall in love with the smell of decay.

We don’t know love until we’re pulled into grotesque vulnerability with damp abandon, standing guard, ready to wage war in its name.

We don’t know beauty until we’re fundamentally moved by craggy edges, rust, fungus, and pelting rain.

Beauty turns to dust on a clean sunlit surface.

It needs to burrow deeply into cyst and sinew, licking scars, drinking sweat, like a reckless amoeba.

Until we arrive here, the game of love and beauty is all make believe. 

Yet when we do, we slip back into a self that we’ve been seeking for a lifetime
but was never more than an arms reach away.

 

Our family had a compound, little creaky cottages by the sea.
I learned about them through my grandmother’s stories, and the images I constructed and carried with me have always felt like home. Sand tracked through kitchens, chasing gulls, lobster traps scattered in disrepair.

Atlantic Avenue is unattainable now, but oh what it must have been back then - before the hurricane that washed it all away.

The magnetic draw of structures by the sea.
Their salt crusted railings, and sand worn edges.
The daily mundane nothingness of life engulfed in the majestic roar of the eternal.
The indoors pushing outward and the salt wind hammering its way back in.
Eventually they all succumb, but the years in between, as cedar and glass press back against the sharp salt wind triumphantly, before they recognize their fate, are a time capsule for the luckiest amongst us, an opportunity to be seized and savored, where any and all humans should simultaneously feel as if they are the least and most significant person on earth.