Cape Cod is a strange piece of land that sticks out into the ocean like the hook of a hat rack. We stay this month near the pointy tip. It is a perfect place to hang your cap. We are about as far out into the Atlantic Ocean as you can be and still be on land. We stay on a spit of land that is basically a big sand bar made by receding glaciers 20,000 years ago. It is the same land where the Mayflower landed one cold day in November of 1620. But the pilgrims knew you couldn’t grow beets and turnips here so never stayed.
In geography text books, this proboscis of land is known as a peninsula, meaning literally “almost an island”. It is a place to be remote, to crawl along the edge of land and time. Mary Oliver knew this well having lived here for 50 years. Each day wandering the dunes and wading knee deep at low tide, I follow her instructions for living life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it”, she wrote.
Here you don’t need to go anywhere. The world rises and falls around you. Terns migrate through, sands shift and cave under your toes, tides are a constant teacher. “I hardly move though I’m traveling a terrific distance,” Mary Oliver wrote. Here you realize you are part of a perpetual drift as the world around you erodes and builds back up again. It is a constant practice—a constant hanging on and constant letting go.
Photo: Kevin Long / Unsplash
