May your own tears reach the sea

By Lumepa Hald 19 April 2017, 12:00AM

The blue coral light of the Lalomanu Sea occupies my soul like a rose takes over the graves and their loneliness. I am swamped with the love of the ocean that broke me. 

Despite her wrath, she still seeks my heart to lie next to her, to comfort her, to forgive her. 

My sweet daughter had thick long hair, which she herself adored in the mirror, as she watched me adoring her small beauty. 

Children growing up are memories we never should let go of. I wonder at times, if my own father finds me in his eyes, standing as a small child, afraid of everything. 

Now in my quietness, I notice through the pain of my daughter leaving me, that her long hair is often flowing in the free wind. I watch her dancing feet, tip toeing on the clouds. 

Dear reader, if you see the clouds here in the sky of Lalomanu, you would think sometimes they are angels arriving and leaving to go sight-seeing on the shores of our islands. 

But each paradise sweetened morning; I feel the joy of the breaking waves racing to touch my tired feet. 

My small toes massage the grains of sand that find their playful wiggling. 

Between the sea and I, this is a special kind of love. It is a love that cries with pain but returns with more. It is a special kind of light. It is a darkness that breaks the nightfall with a whisper from the sway of butterflies. And it is a special kind of sadness. 

It is a tear drop that burns a blue hole in the morning sky.  

But I write about the generous sea. I write about how it does not count its fish life and its coral, which we use up. 

I write of how it does not speak of its healing powers when we are rested and quietly lying under the stars. I write of her softness when we are aggravated, and her passionate harmonic sounds when we are not listening. 

The sea is a church if the church is something that heals the wounded in us. The sea is a mother and a father if we are hungry, and we have no money to count on. The sea is a lover, if we are lost and lonely. May I remind you dear reader, that you live on an island and that the sea is your true identity. 

But here in our modern wanton lives as church believers, we are far from the magic of the sea. We are as the jealous sky of broken dreams empty of wisdom. 

For what man says he loves God but is not as generous as the sea? What man brings to us the meaning of heaven but is the devil in his deeds? So much we have learned in our educated lives, yet so much too we have lost in being educated. 

May I point to the star boundaries of our galaxies to say that you and I are beyond the things we chose to worship. The God I have come to know is not the one asking me to give him from the pocket of the poorest woman in the street. 

He is not the one begging coins from the child who sleeps next to Macdonald’s under the judge-ment of proud citizens. Neither is he the one telling me how to dress elegant like a woman, and think strong like a man. 

The God I know is begging me to stand alone, and to find him, proud of my growing as he is loving me like the rock loves the tree he holds up. 

Dear reader, I live with the sea each day now. I breathe her in too. 

There is no facing the world without the touch of the sea. I agree with Rumi, the poet. The cure of the pain, is in the pain. I shall honor your memory as my growing country, to be proud of, to love and adore, and to always remember that there is more to us than what we really see. 

May your own tears reach the sea.

By Lumepa Hald 19 April 2017, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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