Water, land, sky, the elements that made you come together
here. The water is apparent first, its sight and sound and smell. Gray and blue
shimmer into the deep distance. The wind beats scaly waves that sparkle like diamonds.
Now there’s a shallow patch around a sandbar, and water puts up no resistance
to gravity. Now the invisible momentum of the water breaks upon the slope, and
the waves merge and grow and collapse into foam.
The foam simmers, putting a sound in your ears like meat
sizzling on a stove. It’s quiet again for a moment, then the surge of sound of
breaking waves. In the spaces between the waves the wind pops and crackles in
the little spaces of your ears. The seagulls cry and shout and caw. The dogs
bark, still half-wild after all these years of nibbling our scraps. High
overhead the whistle and roar of a jet airliner trails behind the sight of it.
Sound can’t be rushed like light. It must pass through time to reach you.
You feel that wind breaking and bending around your face. It
scurries away with the heat of your body, and you’re glad for the jacket
wrapping your skin. Your nostrils and sinuses fill with the chemical fingerprint
of the beach. Salt, dirt, the rot of the seaweed and the shit of the gulls. You’re
not built like the dogs, and the scent fails to paint a picture of the scene in
your brain. But the view through your eyes is more than adequate, and the
flavor your nose adds is appreciated.
Silently the ferry moves in the middle distance. It’s not
near, far beyond reach, but it’s much closer than that hilly and wooded
horizon. It looks as much as a force of nature as the wind and clouds and
waves. What could possibly stop that edifice moving silently over the water?
But you know it’s a trick. There’s more power in those little waves and the
light shining down than in a horizon-full of ferries. This is not to say your
fellow humans are irrelevant, but the awe nature inspires is justified.
The blank canvas of the sky is the blue of Rayleigh
scattering. All the white cacophony of light from the Sun gets scattered, but
violet diffuses the most, and the trick of the cones in your eyes is to make
the blue more apparent. You know that’s what’s happening, but what you see is
blue, deep blue, as deep as the depths of space beyond it, and as blue as the
water would be on a perfect, still day. The canvas is mostly filled by the wild
impressionist strokes of gray cloud.
From moment to moment the air overhead changes. It doesn’t
lay still like the sand. Like breath and blood it’s always moving, as though to
lay still would kill the sky. First, layers and patches like plaid fabric, then
deep and rounded clouds covering the sky, then a wide swath of blue forever,
with the dark of the clouds brooding only on the horizon. Perhaps, it occurs to
you, franticness isn’t something made by life, but that life inherited from the
world that conceived it.
Against the surge and crush of the waves you hear a splash,
a sharp, full, punctuated sound. Your child is throwing rocks into the water. He
has your spouse’s eyes. The blue circles of his irises make concrete what’s
symbolized in gold around your fourth finger. His aim needs some work. The next
rock thuds into the mud, too close to his sister. The phone is ringing, the
urgency of the discursive breaks the significance of the meditative, and you
must become again the creature who shepherds these little ones.
So many lives move across the field of your perception. The
broken bits of clam and crab, the seaweed wagging in the surf, the barnacles
caking the rocks, the gulls and crows flapping and banking, the dogs panting,
the flies buzzing are just the lives big enough to see. How many trillions more
are digesting in the sand and circulating in the water? The two little lives, running,
laughing, throwing, screaming, are the ones your life must bend toward.
Everything else can wait, must wait.
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