MADELINE, THE EIGHTH OF THE GREAT DANES

“During moments of weakness, The Great Danes remember that they have been fearless before, and they know they will be so again.”

Madeline, the eighth in our story

What do we do when the torque of the ocean overpowers us, when it throws us, when we feel betrayed by something we loved and believed?

​Ask the girl with the mustache on her finger – she'll lead you out of the water and help you mend before you leave. She’ll tell you stories that make you laugh, she’ll offer you her juice box, she’ll hold your hand until you tell her to release. 

She is the one who camps in the ocean, who prefers the green of the water beneath the surface to the blue that is first seen. She’d make a home there if she could, where life is simpler, where fish slip through her fingers and the sand dollars are all purple with life.
 
She finds trust in that which she cannot control. She launches herself up the crest of a wave to drop back in, sinking down to the sand like something from another world. Perhaps the water parts for her, sending her further and deeper to a peace than we cannot see. And like the wind that whips around our ears, the slosh of the ocean is isolated around her – it is all she senses.
 
Perhaps she is not of this world. Perhaps the ocean sent her to us, to show us what it is to reach out to others, to play and to laugh, to control less and instead just believe.
 
She is Madeline, the mermaid, the eighth of The Great Danes.

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