Watching Ocean Waves

When you walk on the beach, you decline rapidly in importance while the whole of nature sizes you up, admits you back into its wild sanctum and then leaves you in the company of molted feathers, bits of shells and diffident sand crabs.  How can you feel large among a trillion grains of sand and unending waves tormenting the shore?  You are a dot, a mote, a sniggle of energy surrounded in every direction by immensity and a perfection of irrational power.

Stay upright and keep your footing while the ocean snarls and tumbles in from the far curved horizon and tears cliffs apart.  Yell and scream all you want, but your voice is a squeak in comparison, a muffled, swallowed-in-the-roar-of-eternal-sound insignificance.

You are only so high, so strong, so resistant to death at the beach.  You are a flea, a tease on the surface of the sand whose footprints are erased, removed with decisive and randomly sweeping vigor.  As mighty as you may feel, your mightiness is a small snack gulped into the roaring, salted wetness of the cold ocean's fathoms.  It will not last long, your ill temper and pride.  It is worthless in the reality of a restless tide that heaves and slaps without thought or consideration of what your mother thought so precious about you.

Waves of energy, humping and rolling Samurai mountains, move and team with other waves and cross paths with still others, and they would move to the other side of infinity, but somewhere a shore interrupts them, a collision cascades everywhere, then breaks into another infinity of ripples and agonies of splashes.  Or are they joys?  None of them can care.  They go on, indifferently, splendidly, and on forever.

All your life long there is the ocean banging, slapping and jostling everything it touches.  It stinks, it's gorgeous and it pulls back and forth, hearts and souls, beating, pulsing, washing and always restless.  Go to the ocean and be small, unuseful, aimless, inarticulate.  It may save you from yourself just when you are getting to feel you are so fine, so important, and so perfectly unique in the universe.  Ha!