Last week, after I said I felt like kelp floating in the ocean, a dear reader replied, “Kelp is very important. OK to be kelp.” She included a link to support her perspective.
I learned that sea otters and kelp have an important relationship. Sea otters often wrap themselves in kelp so they can rest without fear of floating away. Mother otters will tie up their baby pups while they forage for food.
Kelp anchors itself to a substrate of the ocean. If I’m feeling like the strands of kelp that tangled in my fingers while I swam in the ocean off the Jersey shore, maybe I need to find my substrate.
I need to anchor myself as kelp do, with a “holdfast.” Different aquatic species have different holdfast structures. Wikipedia describes kelp’s as “claw-like.”
Walking in nature is something that anchors me, but all my walks have been with Roxie and those are not anchoring. We are in training and they are work.
It’s time to take a walk outside without Roxie. To take photos, because then I see more. To take a hot bath, just because. And put up a sign that I will see at every meal, with lessons from the “Old Old” (85+ years old) that I gleaned from a New York Times article:
- Don’t brood about things you can’t reach.
- Live as if your time is limited.
- Focus on the people you care about.
- Enjoy the pleasures near at hand.
Chewing the Cud of Good
Thankful for this body in which I live and move and have my being.
(And for the smell of freshly fallen walnuts.)