The water, cold and salty, was suddenly washing over me – feet first then up my legs. I sprang up grabbing towel and iPad, backpack and notebook. My phone was lost to me, I could not see it, I could only hope it wasn’t being carried away.
Is the tide going in or out I wondered before I picked my spot.
30 minutes later, laughing and frantic, now I knew.
My phone reappeared. I tossed the soaked items up shore, grabbed shoes and water bottle and joined the soggy pile. Still laughing and disoriented I stood, pausing to collect myself. I felt a nudge inside. I should move, that the next wave could be here at any moment.
I am much further up the beach now. Writing on drier sand and a sandier notebook. The sand is course. A mosaic of rock and shell, blues and blacks, oranges ranging from salmon to burnt, creams and clears.
I had been writing before, slowly with a heavy mind and weighted limbs. Groggy from yesterday’s fun. Persevering best I could. I find myself lighter for the wave that played a trick on me.
Still, I don’t feel much like writing.
All I feel capable of is playing with the sand. I keep pinching it, leaving small depressions. Then rubbing the captured micro pebbles together, steadily freeing them to bounce along the walls of the finger dug pit.
My attention drifts to the feeling of the sun on my right leg, right thigh, right in the middle on the side. Parts of me are cool, resting weightedon the million smooth soft rocks, my right big toe tucked into the dampsand. The cold spots of my body highlighting the precious sensation of the sun. Warmth radiating, capturing my mind.
I find this morning I have very little to say and am happy to say almost nothing at all. I have been told the practice is the point. Here I lay writing because I have decided I am a writer. Being takes doing.
More than the pull of tiredness to lie here drifting in the sun and sound of waves, more than the desire of ego to explain topics that I would rather not be bothered with in this still moment, I am beckoned by the sand. My attention ebbing and flowing between sun and pebbles. I am pinching it again. Now to form ridges, a mini landscape with microbes and tiny spiders or crabs or all sorts of crawlers I can’t see but I know are there. Like the goats of steep cliffsides they are scaling and scrambling along, adaptive and capable. I look up and to my left and remember the mountainous ridge mirroring what I am forming between my fingers. Hazy and large it juts out forming a cove with the more distant and smoothly sloped mountain to my right.
My phone rings, my brother. He is pulling up to pick me up and save me from the 30 minute walk back up hill, water heavy towel in hand. Having said hardly anything at on this page and more peaceful for it, I say goodbye.