Wild, Wild Sea

 

Stormy beach 2016

Give me a wild sea with boiling clouds, wind that lifts my hair and shuffles the birds around willy nilly.  Give me a wild sea with chocolate waves, briny foam and pelicans diving between large waves.  Give me a wild sea in the middle of winter and an empty space where I can breathe.  Give me a wild sea where salty air is forced into my nostrils, down into my lungs cleansing my body.  Give me a wild sea.

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Rain on the Beach

 

June 10, 2018

This is the shower I loved.

As I shot the sunrising to the northeast

(because the sun moves in that direction from my vantage point in summer),

this shower was approaching from the south.

 Tiny drops announced its arrival.

Tiny drops became bigger drops.

I ducked under a walkway and sat down at the base of a sand dune.

It felt good, the wind and light rain.

Cleansing.  Refreshing.

I laughed watching the pelicans, terns and gulls

feast on the running bluefish

as the rains kept them company.

The shower was short lived.

Pulling myself out of my lair I continued my camera-play.

Sunrise is fun.

Afternoon of Bluefish

Under a blanketed, soft, silvery-light afternoon sky I sat alone, in my chair, reading.  Snuggled close to the dunes I didn’t want interruptions.  Just peace. The peace of being surrounded by the white noise of waves breaking with a soft light great for reading.

However, the bluefish were running.  Small, oily, silver arrows darting through the sea sheer numbers of them attracted sheer numbers of seabirds.  Gulls and pelicans and terns were circling over boiling schools of bluefish.  Once I noticed I couldn’t stop watching.  Pelicans dove from on high, coming back up time and again gulping down wriggling fish.  Gulls, scavengers and “rats” that they are, were observed landing on the pelican’s backs, trying to steal their meal.

Birds and fish.  Green sea, blue sky, muted clouds.  It was a great day.

We Are So Tiny

 

“”Natural boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space.  Fanatical ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”

Carl Sagan

I worry about our country and our planet these days – especially these days – but am taking time to look at photos of planets in our solar system, reading about the cosmos and listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson, who for me boils down the immensity of Space and Time into something fathomable and understandable to my tiny brain.  Our species has been ruled by despots many times in many places and yet our species lives on.  Some folks better than others, but we live on.  Once our planet’s resources are used up by said despots our planet will pitch a tantrum and our time as a species will draw to a close and the insects will take over.  We are already knee deep into the 6th Extinction, I believe.  It’s an interesting time to be a human.

Church in Nature

 

 

“We need to find God,

and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness.

God is the friend of silence.

See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence;

see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…

We need silence to be able to touch souls.”

Mother Teresa

 

I’ve always contended that Nature is my Church.  I’ve tried organized religion and rarely find Spirit in the “house of God.”  Instead, I find Him in the silence of my soul when I talk with Him, when I watch His creatures in the wild and I observe the variations of this beautiful natural cathedral He created we call Earth.  However, I must confess that I also find Him in the ancient musics like Georgian chants, Latin hymns of my father-in-laws Episcopalian faith, Native American wooden flutes and the choirs of children.  Music transcends, and there’s something about not being able to understand the words that lend a mysticism.  I think about these things over the Christmas holiday.

 

Two Pelicans at Sunrise 2014

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

Khalil Gibran

Beach Zen

Peace to each and every one of you!

 

 

The God Light

“You must not lose faith in humanity.

Humanity is an ocean;

if a few drops of the ocean are dirty,

the ocean does not become dirty.”

Mahatma Gandi

For Nelson Mandela

“Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”
(Nelson Mandela)

Rest in peace, Mr. Mandela.