Sunday 12:58 pm
I am alone on the beach watching a seagull dig in the high tide. My legs are baking in the sun. My children are occupied elsewhere. With every surge of wave I can feel my chest tighten – I’m pulled into a huge breath, held, rib-caged – then expelled in a rush of relief and triumph.
I need to apply more sun screen.
If the earth were to pause, just for seconds, long enough for one wave to flatten out and not make it in – what then? Long enough for us all to float a few inches off the ground and then resume our co-dependency with gravity – what then?
A second gull has joined. A lifeguard zooms by. Could he really drag anyone from the depths, from peril on the seas? These few moments of silence, the breath before it all crashes in again. A pretty peace and then the dull roar: this ocean’s sonic landscape is a metaphor for my life.
The gull is getting closer, and the tide too. Should I swim alone? My orange towel will anchor me to this spot on the horizontal plane. Keep writing, yet what new do I have to say? Thousands before me have loved the water, and thousands after will too, until the climate collapses under the weight of our inevitable industrial greed. Is there life after earth?
The beach, if you can get there, is a great equalizer – all burn, all sink, all are powerless against the tide. We row, row, row for a little while, and then we turn back into the sun, the moon, from whence we came.
My heart does these palpitations just before the crest, the foam, at the inevitability of the wave. The organ within me that is most tidal, rhythmic, speeding up during storms but otherwise as steady as the lunar seas – it is this hunk of flesh that responds physically, psychologically, to the fragility of my planetary tether.
If land is the part of God we think we know, then ocean is the part we haven’t even begun to know. And the sky beyond all of it is the God we’ve never thought to fathom. Connections outside of our limited dimensions we could never even make, except in those tiny moments, just before cresting, when our heart’s muscle synchs within a breath, within a gut’s surge of intuition, deep and deeper beyond what we arrogantly believe can be known. God is there if God is anywhere.
What this means for me and the approaching gull I cannot say. We are both just waiting with our feet wet while the great machine of the earth winds down.
The gull is looking at me. Can he see the sun glinting off my clipboard? Hear the scratch of my pencil on bright notebook paper, a paper whiter than the clouds, with thin blue lines, thinner than the sea at horizon, and one solitary red line, audacious and vertical, with a pinkness that, like my audacious human heart, stands in perpetual perpendicularity to the known elements as if to say ”we are all one but I, I am particularly alone.”
Here is the gull now, running, with his bright and curious eye. Run, brother bird and sister sea. Beat on, secret heart, while I sit in full sun to pay a quiet moment’s tribute to fathomable life.
