Beachcombing Time

I can spend long hours simply watching the ocean and the clouds here, listening to the soothing sound of the surf breaking on the shore.  The beach is a wide one, so wide and flat that last year we actually ran on it (and will do so again), and because it is so wide it seems as if time itself becomes wider, more plentiful.  The hours slow down, washing in one after another, wave by wave.  It reminded me of the quote J. P. Krol posted in his blog, High on LeConte (http://www.highonleconte.com/daily-posts) this morning.

"We complain incessantly about the 'fast pace of modern life,' and say that we have 'no time'.  But of course most of us have lots of time, or else every study wouldn't show that we watch three or four or five hours of television a day.  It's that time the way it really works has come to bore us.  Or at least make us nervous, the way that silence does, and so we need to shut it out. We fill time, instead of letting it fill us." - Bill McKibben

Tall clouds towered up this morning in ornate shapes.  One could believe in the "the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" that Shakespeare saw.

This afternoon just after low tide I decided to let time fill me up, as it were; to become a Beachcomber again:  "A person who searches beaches for useful or interesting items."  I have been trying to learn the names of shells - the local Visitors Guide printed a refresher course this month - and I am fascinated by the names they have been given:  

Cockle
Lettered olive
Scotch bonnet
Coquina
Rosy wolf snail
Jackknife
Whelk
Spiny jewel boxes

I could not find any of these specimens at all, but I thought that the nameless ones, or those whose names I did not know, and the broken pieces of them were interesting items!

This little delicacy looks like it just came out of the oven, sprinkled with sugar and spices:

This one looked like it had been burnished with that same light that settled all across the horizon as the sun was going down.

And this one I might dare to call, in my own little encyclopedia of scattered shells, a fine specimen of "Porcelain Ear," broken from a child's doll:

This fine stoneware dinner plate, fired in the kiln of the morning sky, was hurled in anger at someone and broken into pieces.

This one reminded me of cliff-dwellings somewhere out in that vast open country we saw when we traveled out west last summer:

And this stone tablet contains cuneiform-like characters in an unfamiliar language; I can almost translate it.  It is a poem, I think about the ocean and its manifold treasures. 

I walk with my shirt off on this balmy day, temperatures up in the 60s, the first time I have had my shirt off out of doors in months.  And suddenly while I am walking the translation comes to me; I remember it as if from a poem I learned long ago in my childhood:

Sandpipers skitter in the incoming surf, 

And gulls stand sentinel, looking out to sea;

Suddenly they rise up and fly, close to the waves,

Gleaming reflected in the afternoon light.

There is no other place than this;

There is no other moment.