You have to be free

I am writing this from the sea of California. This afternoon I drove four hours up the coast to the tiny house that I've rented; its walls are covered with seashells of various types and in a variety of presentations. This evening I walked down to the beach--I nearly forgot how to move my legs while walking down to the beach, that's how beautiful it was. I hadn't seen the ocean in at least two years. It is some kind of spectacular.

I stood in front of all that raw power with my bare feet planted wide in the sand and I took it--the wind, the waves, the inexplicable flood that reached all the way up to my toes one time--when I first stood in front of the ocean--and then not once more in the 40 minutes that I stood there. My hope is that mother Ocean was saying hello after all those years of separation.

People talk about the sun "disappearing" behind the clouds, but it doesn't disappear when clouds move across it. It's just temporarily eclipsed. To stand on the edge of the Pacific Ocean is to watch the sun actually disappear--to shine so bright that you can't even look at it and then slip away, regardless of whether you missed that last split second of great orb shining. Only it's still not that immediate; I laughed out loud when the sky started pulsing again, a few more shimmers showering the ocean with light, then the stillness of wind and water and waves.