EditorialJoe.com | A Hack You Know and Love

This is it. Wednesday I start a job that will conclude each shift at 7AM.

What an amazing gift. I’ll bring my running shoes to work. At the end of my shift, I’ll smell the salty sea air and jog down the beach as the sun rises over the East Coast.

Oh, mother Atlantic…I’ve always wanted to line near the ocean, but I’ve never had the oppotunity until now. Lady Fate’s mass of creation, the place where all life began–right in my backyard.

When we tread on the sand, it’s not just peices of old rocks. It’s fragments of shells, the homes of our ancestors mixed and refined into a great sea of silicon oxide, calcium carbonate, potassium and sodium salts. We tread on the legacy of a billion years of life and death.

It’s not just the size of the ocean that makes it so awe-inspiring a body. It’s the energy: enough to dwarf a living being no matter the wealth of its culture or the gift of its brain-body ratio, yet so powerful and warm that some part of us–some millions-year-old string of DNA inside us–remembers that it was once our home and longs to be near it.

For every time I wanted to give up and move away, for all of my frustration at not finding a job and running out of money and giving up a cozy position in a familiar place to move here–the sea had a feeling to match.

At my worst, Lady Fate asked me to have faith. To laugh. To breathe in the vibe of the sea; to flow and ebb knowing that I would end up where I needed to be.

It’s here. I don’t know for how long, and I don’t know what event will mark the calendar when I feel it’s time to shift again, but I know for sure that this place is where I need to be right now.

My mind is on fire. I rewrote a screenplay in two weeks–the same screenplay that I could not change a page of as I sat in Milford, jumping from issue to issue of the Magazine and never seeming to get caught up. When I completed my edit of The Third Person, I outlined a new screenplay in the next three days. I’ve already started writing it, up to 25 pages.

I have no idea what’s going to happen from here on out, but every time I see the deep violet of evening settling over the Atlantic as the sun burns west, I know I’m in the right place.

“Have faith,” she said. “Just relax and embrace this moment. Have faith.”

As always, she was right.