Living Life Alive

There was a time when I lived on an isolated tip of a tropical peninsula.

It was a place where the days were bleached in a searing sun. Where the afternoons were ritually ripped apart by monstrous thunderstorms.

It was serene and peaceful. Where the nights could be spent listening to the waves crash across the dark dunes; where baby turtles scurried across the cooling sand.

Back in those days, I drove a yellow convertible; frequently along the coastal highways. And across the numerous bridges the locals called causeways.

On the causeways, pirated Spanish Mane winds would whip the little car back and forth with salty air that smelled of endless summers and vacations.

The turquoise waters there were as beautiful as to be surreal. And on the warm, sugary sand, the spectators and dreamers would gather. The sand was a place that offered an opportunity to live life most uniquely and startlingly alive.

But the sand was an illusion - it was an almost infinite collection of single pieces of the finest silica - fragments of seashells deposited over the eons. Things once alive in their beauty were now given to be among the collected and carpeted; forever witness to the ultramarine sky and turquoise waters.

I was reminded of that when I saw the poppies.

It had been a picture of the Royals - Kate, William and Harry - walking through a crimson sea of poppies in London. It was a stunning comparison.

The origin of the poppy symbolism comes from words penned in May, 1915.

Army surgeon John McRae was in France, near the Ypres-Yser canal. And he wrote moving words that would bequeath generations with a poetic grief that would forever remind us all of life's value.

Of the joy of living life. Of the gift of being alive.

Hiding near the river, he watched, up close, as a fellow soldier lost his life. After he escaped death himself, he wrote a heartfelt poem about what he had witnessed - about wasted lives and the profound sorrow he felt for them.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

And that simple poetic treatise is why, at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorated the nearly 900,000 servicemen who lost their lives; who lost their living.

McRae's simple words will forever describe the precious nature of life - and loss. That the suffering the loss of so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any ideal. That such a great sacrifice should never be asked.

Each flower offers itself to beauty of the whole - a royal carpet upon which Kate, William and Harry would slowly stroll, in amazement of the coral glory.

Back in my little corner of paradise, I was reminded that living alive was a gift that wasn't always granted to everyone.

I was alive and living. Breathing, writing, feeling. The Caribbean winds blowing my hair around on the causeways.

Walking in the soft, sugary sand and gazing at impossible turquoise beauty.