Skadi and God

The whole family went beach-combing this morning. Mama is trying to get Grandpa to name his new sailboat "Seaglass," and thought it was an omen that we found so much of it on the beaches. Seaglass, in case you don't know, is what happens when somebody drops a glass bottle out at sea, and it smashes into tiny pieces, which are mulled over by the water until the edges wear soft and the glass itself becomes opaque. It's some of the most beautiful stuff on earth, and today we found not only numerous pieces of green, but even some clear, a brown, and two (very rare) bits of cobalt blue. They were most of them mine--apparently I have an eye for seaglass.

I found a spiral shell about four inches long, washed gray-blue-cream by Atlantic's endless murmer. There were stones of every conceivable color. I chose pure white, mottled red-grey, green-grey, blue-silver, onyx, and others. Mommy thinks that I'm fascinated by periwinkles (small spiral snail shells from which the snails have ceased to be), and she's right. They are mirabile visu!

Burgee and I went barefoot, and the rest of the family was suitably impressed with our daring, because there are many very rocky places with small, sharp stones on a New England beach. However, it had to be. I can't bear to wear shoes on a shoreline; I must always be able to play with Atlantic and her seafoam. Our games of tag are indispensable.

As we rambled over the rocks, I was thinking of Skadi. Do you know her story? In Norse mythology, Skadi was the blonde, ice-eyed goddess of winter and the north. She wore a blue-white fur cloak with a silver clasp, and carried silver spears and arrows, and had white wolves to attend her. For some reason which I forget at the moment, the other gods told Skadi that she had to marry. They picked a rather silly way for her to choose a husband. All the male unmarried gods swathed themselves from head to ankle, and Skadi was set to pick a pair of feet. She chose the best feet (though what constitutes "best feet" I can't imagine. What do you want, especially straight toes? Nicely turned heels? Smooth soles?), which she thought would belong to Balder the Beautiful, handsomest of the gods.

As it turned out, they belonged to Njord, god of summer and the sea. Big mistake. Njord lived in a palace by the water, and Skadi was goddess of winter and hunting, not summer and seabathing! The beautiful, cold goddess was profoundly unhappy. In the end, the couple agreed that she would spend 9 months of every year in the far north, and stay with her husband in his palace for 3 months. That is their legend of how there came to be winter and summer, and it reminds me of the Persephone & Pluto story.

Now, I was thinking of this because, ever since I first read that story--I must have been about 14 at the time--I have felt like a Skadi, or like the daughter of Skadi and Njord. Born in winter, I am solitary and somewhat icy by nature. I love blue, silver, white, and the cold northern forest slopes. But I have been brought away from my beloved Massachusetts by my family, and live now in the south, in Maryland. Truly it is as though I am the daughter of them both, because my mother was born and raised in New England, but Daddy is from the deep south and the summerlands. The result is that I love both winter and the sea and the forested mountains, and always feel an exile in the south, except that Virginia is dear to me because it is Daddy's ancestral home. Maryland I do not love, and hardly even like, but Virginia's blue hills and beautiful rivers soothe me.

I will always be drawn to the north, to the sea. I stood on the beach this morning with my feet in the green-blue surf and listened to Atlantic singing her songs, and felt that this indeed is, if not the form of Beauty, something very high up on Plato's line.

But I miss Virginia already. We went on a brief hike at sunset, in the last days of the semester, and I stood on a small cliff looking down into the Shenandoah Valley, into a hazy blue and rose sunset, and thought, "My God, how beautiful you must be, if you make all this!" The others were talking, but I wanted silence. I went a little way farther down the trail, and came back to the quieter of the two little bluffs, and sat and looked and wondered and prayed, resting for what seemed the first time in weeks... until my old enemy, the night darkness, came out to taunt. How I hate the night!--and how I love the south in this, because its nights are blue rather than black, and full of fireflies in summer. One who has seen those tiny lamps oaring their way about in air cannot help wondering if there are fairies after all.

Speaking of fairies, I could scarcely restrain the Longaevi this morning. Simile I could not even see against Atlantic's flank, for she is green-blue-silver as the deep itself. She will be writing poetry for weeks as a result of this trip. Posy was easier; her black-flecked wings bloomed pink against the white sand, and she squealed her joy over every pinkish shell (there are many) that came in her way. Litotes found a bunch of slimy rocks and remained by them all morning. Apparently algae is his new love--it would be something like that. Deton and Polly were happy to write Latin in the sand and skip stones and exclaim over the number and kind of dismembered crabs scattered along the beach (really, one gets the impression that these crabs tear themselves in pieces and strew themselves through the surf, there are so many of their arms and shells lying about). Chiasmus even began to enjoy himself, for, although Atlantic is profoundly disorganized, he found that he could make little piles of different-colored rocks and tot up their numbers and busy himself with keeping them from being swept away in the waves.

Paradoxus was... well, he was Paradoxus. The sound of Atlantic charmed him most; he rode on my shoulder all morning, head cocked to one side, simply listening. I found enough bits of green seaglass to make a magnificent chain for his neck, which pleased him because, of all the colors to be found on a beach, that particular bright green-gold is the rarest and finest. He is now off somewhere composing a sea-song on his pipes, and will most likely stay up very late working at it. That is his way, and all my pleading to the contrary avails nothing.

I, by contrast, am getting plenty of sleep and sun. My feet are washed clean by the scrubbing sand and seething water. I feel alive, fresh, aired and bleached and tanned and ready for anything. One does not know how heavy the cares of the semester sit on one's shoulders until a vacation, a long laughing firelit, sunlit, lamplit vacation, full of colors. You know by my writing how many colors I am seeing, and they are all new in my eyes. Color and light... color and light. if someone asked me, "what is God like to you?" I would say, "God is a consuming fire, the sun, and every color on earth. God is white radiance."

On a beach I see God's fingerprints everywhere, and I will bring them home with me in the form of a thousand tiny, bright shells and stones, to strew about my room and keep me from forgetting what my Lord hath wrought. Blessed be He. Te amo, Domine!