Wonder and Joy

Martha had been sending me pictures of whelks and dolphins yesterday afternoon from the beach, and I realized that I should be out on there, too.  So I wrapped up my post about honeybells and Democrats and dolphins and did just that.

There were indeed dolphins, leaping out of the water, tails glistening high in the air as they dived down into what must have been a tasty little school of fish.  But alas, none of the dozens of photos I took captured them, although I could see them plainly with the naked eye.

I did find a Portuguese Man of War myself (well, Martha, who had already surveyed the beach pretty thoroughly between the condo and Oceanana Pier, actually pointed it out to me).

More amazing than anything else she found, though, was this tiny slip of paper, which had miraculously survived wind and wave, lying undisturbed on the beach.

It was the size and shape of a message found inside a Chinese fortune cookie, and perhaps that is where it came from - had someone been cracking open fortune cookies out here on the beach sometime since the last tide?  What a coincidence this was!  We had planned to see the Chinese Lantern Festival after Christmas, on our way to Raleigh and Atlantic Beach, but because we had left a day earlier than planned our plans did not work out.  The Festival, now in its fifth year, is held in Cary at the Koka Booth Amphitheater from late November through mid-January, and the lanterns on display are created from hundreds of parts and thousands of LED lights.  We have always wanted to see this festival.

This year, an attendance record was set as over 120,000 visitors passed through the gates of the amphitheater and viewed the huge dragons and pandas and swans.

How this "fortune " arrived on the beach directly outside the condo is a mystery we will never be able to solve.  But life is full of coincidences, is it not?  The psychologist Carl Jung wrote about what he called Synchronicity; he thought that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.  He would have enjoyed discovering this message on the beach, not even tucked inside a bottle, but clearly meant for us to find.

Wonder and joy can indeed be found at the Lantern Festival, but it can also be found here, right under our feet.