There are times in my life...I feel like the lighthouse keeper. I got to visit an old lighthouse today and there's something about lighthouses that gives me the creeps...I don't know what it is. Something about stepping into the past...maybe feeling the loneliness that I'm sure lighthouse keepers felt...and today it struck me how helpless you'd be as a lighthouse keeper. I mean you tend to the light and you're especially attentive and aware on stormy or foggy nights. Your job is to keep that light running for ships and sailors and adventurers.
I happened to run across the list of ship wrecks by that lighthouse while the lighthouse was in working condition (meaning the lighthouse was functioning when those wrecks happened). I could only imagine the lighthouse keeper sitting high up in the lighthouse seeing the ship, blowing that obnoxiously loud fog horn and making sure that light was shining out onto the water as the rough waves threw the helpless ships and passengers into the unseen...and all the lighthouse keeper could do was know and watch. I can imagine them shouting from atop their towers, furious cries of warning behind the glass, before the light, drowned out by the fog horn and the howling wind.
I am like that lighthouse keeper. I know what's ahead and I can see where the storms going to throw those ships and all I can do is yell and keep that light going hoping and praying that they make it out alive. It's not that I don't want to be involved...It's that my involvement can only come at a distance because despite my strength and my heart I know my job is to tend the light and that I only can not jump into the water and save the ship because if I did that I too would perish.
Somedays you're the captain and somedays you're the lighthouse keeper.
-k.
No comments:
Post a Comment