60 Seconds for Time Out Tuesday: When Will You Be Ready to Leave Your Small River?

Hello to you listening in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire, England!

Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Time Out Tuesday and your host, Diane Wyzga.

The salmon are running here. The ones that left our estuaries as small fry, headed out into the Pacific Ocean and return home a few years later as fully grown adults to spawn, their wild adventure at an end. Like the salmon there have been moments in my life when I risked it all, on a dream, a vision, a hope. My risk-taking ways have rewarded me with chances I could not have taken from the comfort of an armchair. But of late I find myself feeling rusty, maybe drifting in the current, anxious to feel alive in the old way.

I know what calls me. David Whyte’s (our Whidbey Island, Washington poet laureate) poem A Song For the Salmon, gives voice to that deepest longing, to be gone again on a great journey. Perhaps it will call to you…

A Song For the Salmon

“For too many days now I have not written of the sea,

nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents

we find between the islands.

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon

threading the dark streams of reflected stars,

nor have I dreamt of his longing

nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,

to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,

nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean

opening its white hands on the seashore,

nor the salted wind, whole and healthy

filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves

fallen out of heaven onto earth,

nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction

of a thousand miles of ocean

giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,

the ocean of longing shifts through me,

the blessed inner star of navigation

moves in the dark sky above

and I am ready like the young salmon

to leave his river, blessed with hunger

for a great journey on the drawing tide.” [by David Whyte ]

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Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team

Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts

Music: Mer’s Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music

All content and image © 2019 to Present: for credit & attribution Quarter Moon Story Arts