A Gift From the Sea

I got up to North County very early today. So early, in fact, that I thought I would hop over to Ki’s, which is just a little north of my work. Through the glass I could see grey-green waves curling up close to the sand with frothy white veins crawling across the face of the ones closer to shore. The beach was calling me. I decided to get my coffee to-go, and darting across the still-vacant 101 freeway (at 7:15 on a Monday in a beach community I guess no one is up and about just yet) I hoppled over the piles of smooth rocks and sunk into the cold, early-morning sand.

As I walked, with the gentle, briny mist enveloping my face, I scanned the wet sand for gleaming shells and rocks. Out of my peripheral, I spotted a shockingly tangerine rock, sitting brazenly, anchored in the wet sand, almost daring me to pick it up. I’m pretty sure it called me a punk.

Anyway, I stooped down to pick it up when a thought occured to me (it does happen from time to time); you know what it’s like when thought-time and real-time are different lengths? All of this ran through my head during the brief movement I made toward the ground: first, I remembered that I often pick up rocks that look beautiful within the frame of the wet, shining sand only to later find they have been dulled by their new residence in a jar on a desk. I would enjoy the memory of the stones’s beauty as it laid in its home on the soft shoreline more than I would snatching it up to sit in a collection.

How often have I robbed myself of the fullest expression of beauty (or goodness) by the desire to possess? Beauty unfulrs itself when it is free, when it can just simply exist, to be shared, belonging to no one in particular and belonging to everyone. Even more than that, when the desire to get your grubby hands all over something subsides, how much more liberated is your awareness? Being present in the moment, without longing to cease a moment or a memory or a souvenir to enjoy at a later time, allows me to experience it in its fullest expression.

I thought about how fast the weeks, months and years are flying past me- and how they are continually gaining in speed- and I pondered if maybe this is the only way to live so that I won’t be continuously looking back to what just whizzed past me. Letting go of the desire to possess beauty, or a moment, or a feeling. To just (as I seem to be learning over and over again) be.