Thoughts on the beach

Written June 2, 2009

Already I've gotten myself thoroughly soaked. I want to charge into the ocean, so as to be in closer communion with it. And it charges back, changing from ferocity to gentleness, laughing waves with deep-seated wisdom. The sea is ever moving, never tiring, always changing its environment, always being affected by what comes to it, and yet without giving up its inherent nature. I can be exhausted by it and enlivened by it. I don't think we as a people grasp the sacredness of water. The same percentage of water constitutes our bodies as our planet; somewhere between 70-80%.

So many are drawn to it but, this place feels odd. Though the ocean can't be tamed, all the life has been scrubbed clean away so as to make this spot more like a pool than a place of the earth. Dunes remain, clinging to the element of sand between those of water and man. Birds more like silent, spoiled and neglected children punctuate he vastness of multi-colored humanity; cawing in remembrance of their wildness, sounding notes between the heavy staccato of babble. Houses with an emptiness, clothed in bleached pastel hues, knuckle down together leaving no space save that which is allotted about their peired ankles. I imagine trees; brushwood, brittle tufts of grass hiding secrets of living. Was there a rocky ledge? A place where human feet nearly stumbled and where human eyes suddenly reeled at the sight of open sea?

The air is unmistakable. Unrivaled in its complex aroma. A taste and feeling so vivid it defies feeble memory and waits upon its home threshold to be discovered anew. With the rising of a beating sun, I retreat to home, the beach too filled with the images and feelings of an existence now quite foreign. With nightfall, the ocean will buck off those sensations, release itself from human expectation, and dance with a fierceness and beauty that belies the wisdom of Nature we so easily forget to be a part of.