There is nothing more enlivening than walking on West Sands. Walker and I fell in love talking along it, scaling its dunes, standing in silence at its demise, not breathing at the glory of the pink clouds over the lines of distant lit windows. On that hard sand, we have wept for leaving each other, and there he has carried me over waves and lifted me to touch the oh-so-low clouds.
Today was our first sea-walk, and I have been thinking about three things:
- I feel so small on that flat, massive assembly of earth and water. That is good.
When I am so enthralled by some thing totally apart from me, that I forget about possessing it, and just enjoy it, I am most alive.
- The sea is by turn furiously windy, and silent. Yet always the same. It is always gray and blue, sometimes streaked with neon orange. We always know it, yet it's always so dramatically different.
I’ve thought about beauty a lot, and I think the stability and order, cross-cut by a twinge of randomness, is what resonates with us humans. Art or houses or sounds that are too mathematically perfect, too logical, too metronomic, make us feel crammed in or bored; too loose and scattered, and we have no point of reference and feel lost. But that ordered randomness of the sea, the way the sea carves holes in perfect intervals interspersed with random shells -- that feels safe.
- The sea creates the land, rubbing rock into sand, and the land makes the sea. I do not want to turn everything into a metaphor; but, that harmonious tension is meant to be.
It’s good to be back.