Sea Change

I'm at the SPU library trying to get homework done. It's one of the only places I can really settle in and work. It's just very pleasant. I very much miss working here and going to school here.

I'm supposed to be doing homework, but as I was walking through campus, I was completely captivated by a quote on one of the banners: "So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. / Believe that a further shore is reachable from here." -Seamus Heaney. SPU's motto is "Engaging the Culture and Changing the World," so most of these banners have something to do with that. It's corny, I know. We made fun of it when we went to school here, but it's had a pretty profound impact on my life. One of my favorite quotes of late (it's on my facebook along, now, with Heaney) is

"You see things, and say why? But I dream things that never were, and I say why not?"
~George Bernard Shaw

There's something about this that really captures the imagination. Why not dream about how to change the world? I love sea-change because it's so poetic, but has a lot of meaning too. "Suffer a sea change into something rich and strange." Of course, that is Shakespeare, from The Tempest. Sorry, I apologize for getting all literary, but that's kind of the way my brain works (years of English-major training). The play is about a ship wreck, and sea change in the nautical sense can be a dangerous violent thing. But change can be good also, especially when we (as individuals or a society) desperately need it. And no I'm not really talking about Obama, but I guess it's undeniable that change is in the air. Anyway, I won't drone on any longer. Here's some more of Heaney's poem:


Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

-From The Cure at Troy