The boats are bobbing like tiny colorful corks out past the peer, one of those ancient, sturdy ones made of thick planks, jutting out thirty feet into the bay. It is six thirty, morning in late June. No one but the usual sputtering sea gulls walk the beach....
wait..I just realized. This particular beach is always deserted. It is the far end of a State Park that you have to backpack four miles into before reaching the ocean. Northeast. The beach is rocky, not with pebbles but with huge boulders of every variety and shape rising and receding as the waves rush over them, stroking them smooth as ice, shimmering in the fragile morning light. If you are agile you might lob yourself from one to the next, helped by other small ones. But take care not to chose those that have grown slippery from moss. Only the rocks that have the constant brush of the ocean are safe unless they are tall enough to escape it altogether. for every rock there is a pool, some mildly stagnant, some a constant quiet flow, the seaweed ungulating first in one direction and then delicately back only to turn again as the waves change.
A bit of time has past. The sun has risen and already that smell of heating earth, drying out of nature is filling the air. Your face begins to feel the suns touch. As you look out to the ocean's edge you have to squint a little.
The aloneness is total.
It is almost frightening for a moment. But as you stay, the thing inside that is you, standing on that huge rock, on one long deserted beach which stretches out on either side to two wavering gray lines, with miles of humanless forest at your back, with microscopic creatures swimming and crawling around you, surrounded by so many undisturbed things, there comes the peace, the letting go and filling up and you feel the oneness of the connections of all beings and their comfort, their tears. And looking out at those dark, angry waves so unstoppable, you think that there just might be a God.
(Yeah, yeah, okay a Higher power or whatever/whoever you may feel that to be. Or you can delete the last line. I suppose it's self evident.)
wait..I just realized. This particular beach is always deserted. It is the far end of a State Park that you have to backpack four miles into before reaching the ocean. Northeast. The beach is rocky, not with pebbles but with huge boulders of every variety and shape rising and receding as the waves rush over them, stroking them smooth as ice, shimmering in the fragile morning light. If you are agile you might lob yourself from one to the next, helped by other small ones. But take care not to chose those that have grown slippery from moss. Only the rocks that have the constant brush of the ocean are safe unless they are tall enough to escape it altogether. for every rock there is a pool, some mildly stagnant, some a constant quiet flow, the seaweed ungulating first in one direction and then delicately back only to turn again as the waves change.
A bit of time has past. The sun has risen and already that smell of heating earth, drying out of nature is filling the air. Your face begins to feel the suns touch. As you look out to the ocean's edge you have to squint a little.
The aloneness is total.
It is almost frightening for a moment. But as you stay, the thing inside that is you, standing on that huge rock, on one long deserted beach which stretches out on either side to two wavering gray lines, with miles of humanless forest at your back, with microscopic creatures swimming and crawling around you, surrounded by so many undisturbed things, there comes the peace, the letting go and filling up and you feel the oneness of the connections of all beings and their comfort, their tears. And looking out at those dark, angry waves so unstoppable, you think that there just might be a God.
(Yeah, yeah, okay a Higher power or whatever/whoever you may feel that to be. Or you can delete the last line. I suppose it's self evident.)
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