"Going forward, my will was the wind." - H.D.

Today is a year and a day since the day I was married, six months and a day since the day that I moved to New York. So much symmetry in something so chaotic leaves me somehow speechless.

This weekend I went to a remote beach with two dear friends, to have some sort of ceremony to mark these things. A part of me was horrified with myself, the cheesiness of it all, the self absorbtion - hadn't I better just make a dartbord with a significant face and write some bad poetry in the style of Sylvia Plath and maybe burn something?

Deeper than this, though, I knew it was something real I was going to do. Not to purge myself of pain or call down healing, or make a statement, but to take a new vow.

Since I was small, I've taken it for granted that I will take on other people's pain, and it will hurt me, and I'll cry and move on. I didn't have a victim mentality, or even a martyr complex - I just somehow expected it, and then managed to be suprised and destroyed each time I was crushed.

I've tried to take away people's pain, but the way I did so was so bound up in my ego and in fear that I could never accomplish it. One night, while thinking about my most spectacular failure in this arena - my love and desire to save my husband from himself, while at the same time drowning in my own fears, I realized that I needed to take a new vow, a purer vow, to meet the sufferings of the world as an adult, for once, to see what was to come with my eyes open, rather than cowering and waiting for the pain to break over my head, as if there were nothing I could do.

I was born with an emotional makeup that made me an unconcious bodhisattva, and there is nothing more useless that that. I resolved to go to the ocean, and re-baptise myself into a full spiritual adulthood. I didn't know how I would do it, just that it was time.

The original date was supposed to be Easter, but I got sick. So I meditated some more. Suddenly I realized that the anniversary of my wedding day was coming up....and if there was ever a symbol for the kind of blind falling-on-the-sword I've been prone to, this was it. I tried to prepare, again, and again, but nothing was right. I had poems to read, but ended up forgetting to bring them. I bought a significant necklace - I lost it. Up until the very night before we were scheduled to leave, I had nothing. A few hours before I went to meet my friends, I stopped by a little stall on the street where an old man was selling incense. I watched him sprinkle nuggets and leaves over charcoal, and decided to buy a little. In a few words, I managed to tell him what it was for, and asked him to recommend a scent for mourning, for meditation, for a beautiful morning. He mixed one especially for me, and pressed it into my hand with a blessing.

A friend had offered to videotape the whole thing, and while the idea made me terribly nervous, it seemed right, somehow. But here I was, with only a little incense - what kind of "ceremony" would this be, just me, and a vow, by the ocean?

We arrived on the abandoned beach at eight o'clock in the morning. The fog was incredibly thick, and the bluffs were so high and steep that we crept down like clinging crabs, one sideways step at a time, shedding stones and cascades of crumbling cliff-bits as we went.

The beach was made up of thousands of perfectly round stones - I'd never seen anything like it. They rolled over themselves as we walked, seeming to move beneath us, out of or into our way, shifted by our shifting weights and wobbling steps. The sea rolled them over themselves as well - like marbles, and under the familar wave-sound you could hear the clacking and scouring of the rocks rolling against and over each other.

I lit my little fire in the sand and tried to pretend that there was no camera being set up, that I hadn't dragged two friends miles and miles before dawn to film "Amanda's Home Movie of Enlightenment". But the friends were glowing with the morning and the excitement and the gorgeousness of the sea and the landscape. The insence gave off an incredible smell of myrrh and sea-salt and rosemary and pines. I took a deep breath in and felt my eyes fill with tears. One year ago that day I'd been a bride, feeling helpless and more lost than this.

I got up and stared at the ocean - the wind and the waves were high...all I could do was wade in. Where was my ceremony? My symbolism? All I could feel was sadness for the self that had been. The cold of the water in the first wave knocked both the breath and the sadness from me - I walked further and further, jumping a bit with each new shock. This I could understand - this blind walking and the cold awakenings. Slowly the waves lost thier power to suprise me with their cold, and I began to think of the bodhisattva vow I'd been meditating on for weeks.

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
A guide for those who journey on the road;
For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
And a lamp for those who long for light;
For those who need a resting place, a bed,
For all who need a servant, may I be a slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power, and the supreme remedy.
May I be the trees of miracles,
And for every being, the abundant herds.

Like the great earth and the other elements,
Enduring as the sky itself endures,
For the boundless multitude of living beings,
May I be the ground and vessel of their life.

Thus, for every single thing that lives,
In number like the boundless reaches of the sky,
May I be their sustenance and nourishment
Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering

The waves began to seem to me like beings rushing towards me, and I found myself kneeling, bowing to each one as it came. The waves began to lift me, and as the rocks shifted underneath, and the waves continued to come, I'd lose my footing, but again and again, a wave would approach, I'd bow, and it would wash up against me. I came in a little way - and walked out a little way, still bowing, still thinking of my vow. My friends disappeared from my line of sight, and I thought of the crowds of people I pass by every day, the people who wash over me, who shock me with their loveliness, or coldness, or indifference, or compassion, or pain, or wisdom. I thought of the unexpected rhythms that people fall into...it is hard to give any words to. I kept bowing to the waves and sudenly I was swimming in them, not standing or kneeling any more, but completely without power. I let the water carry me back to the shore, and made my way back to the little fire. I found that I was crying very hard, and wasn't sure what to do. I just sat there and gave into it, and my friend brought me a towel. I sat that way, thinking, and crying, and wondering what to do next, until my friend made me laugh, and the sun came out.

Words are completely failing me again...but after all, it was an indescribable experience.

We watched the film on a large screen at Monkey Town, with about 10 people. I was so afraid to show it to anyone, thinking they wouldn't understand, they'd find it insufferable and self indulgent, but to my surprise, everyone who saw it, without knowing the story behind it, had understood implicitly what was going on, and had better and more beautiful words to describe what they saw than I did.

I'm glad it was filmed - it was unreal to see from the outside what had been so intensely an interior experience. And it's bizarre to see yourself cry...in movies the tears are fake - home videos are shot to capture fun moments - but that sort of abandoned lonesomeness is something you associate with...well, being alone and unwitnessed.

What a strange and incredible weekend - what what strange and incredible friends I have, to put up with, and understand me.