Curiosity: Small Feats of Courage

At the merge zone between wet and dry that we call Asilomar Beach, courage and curiosity did a quiet duet.  The dancers -- a dog, a girl and a dancing woman -- were and curious fearful explorers where the ocean breeze and bright sun played off one another in counterpoint.  Shorebirds looking for tidbits in the sand seemed indifferent but kept their eyes on the dance, a tiny audience that moved about on stilt-like legs at the periphery.

Creatures and people walked or trotted along the shallow water's edge, but in the heart of one small black dog courage and curiosity took hold in equal measure.  He was a runner, a dog whose body built speed quickly and stretched out with long beautiful strides as he went after his bright orange ball.  The ball, thrown by his master far down the beach, barely kept ahead of the dog who stretched his body out straight with the effort of each stride.  Then, with the ball caught, he would slow, taking a dozen more strides to reach full stop, and then galloped back with the ball in his jaws.  He was a canine athlete, exceptional in his running ability, and we stopped to watch.

The master had a throwing tool popular at the beach, and the dog was eager to go.  The throw was long again and the dog launched himself into a reckless run, bound to catch the devil ball as soon as he possibly could.  But this time the ball arched out over and then into the ocean water's heaving swells, and it became immediately apparent that the dog was not a swimmer.  He had no idea that the water would only go up to his chest and no further. His perspective only allowed for the fact that there was no firm ground on which to stand where the ball was and that he saw it plain as day, bobbing in the surf.

He trotted to and fro, glancing at his master and then eyeing the ball intently.  It may as well have been on the moon.  Where before he had had the heart to run to tomorrow and back to retrieve his ball, he was undone by the fear of water.  He trotted in up to his elbows and retreated, anxious to get to the ball but held as if by a leash.  The master and his friends walked up and encouraged the black dog to go out, go on, you can do it, but it did no good.  His eyes were locked on the ball, but fear had a firm lock on him.

We looked in the opposite direction to the north end of the beach.  A strong young man walked out into the wide shallows where rippling remnants of waves lapped at his ankles and calves.  He carried his little girl whose hair lifted on the luffing breeze, and her arms were loosely hung around his shoulder.  When you are two and carried up high, the world takes on a very different dimension.  She was carried by her striding father far out into an endless ocean, where she lost reference points and did not understand the new liquid dimension before her.

He bent over and showed her the rippling surface and the shallow sandy bottom, held her out like a little airplane and let her examine the water for a long time.  He let her down low to dip her toes in.  She was having none of it, no sir.  She curled up like a pillbug and refused to touch the wet coldness.  She was interested, curious to know about the ocean, but she always curled up her legs and avoided the final knowledge through touch.  It was far too big and uncertain for her to cope with, not at all like her bath at home.

A dome-like sandbar had formed offshore, a hundred yards long and a hundred yards out beyond a lagoon-like area of rippling tidal movement.  A young woman waded steadfastly out to the sandbar and stood there looking for all the world like Christ walking on water.  The sandbar was partially submerged, just deep enough to have wavelets wash across its surface but only ankle high on the young woman.  She trotted back and forth out there, thrilled apparently with the unusual sand formation and the vantage point that it afforded.  She danced and twirled and stooped to look for things.

The small girl watched her from her own perch in her father's strong arms and looked down at the water.  She pointed to it and he swooped her down again, an airplane girl with wide wings.  She reached for the water and touched it with her fingertips and then was swooped up again, smiling.  A sailboat rounded the point to the north and bent to leeward as it sailed south.  The man with his daughter held snugly watched it with shaded eyes.  The white sail was full and taut and cut a fine figure as it moved across their view.

The black dog waited until the tide brought the devilish ball closer in.  Then he timed its rise on a small swell with a quick lean farther out over the water and snapped it up in his mouth and turned to hear the applause from his people who were still gathered behind him on the firm sand.  The shorebirds skittered away and continued their hunt while the ocean moved making burbling sounds everywhere.

Beach Dancers

I looked out at the corduroy sea at midmorning, long lines of waves queueing to crash against rocks and tower with waving fronds of froth.  Such an ocean it was, rocking itself to and fro and seeming to slap its hands together, one set of waves put against another, currents interlacing and joining one another in a hissing madness.

Every person at the shore was watching waves, walking automatically or sitting on rock humps and juts to admire turbulence and order intertwining like wrestling lovers.

A small girl was bent over dangling her fingertips in a small tidepool of ocean water on the beach sand, as if she were playing a keyboard.  She looked to the side, listening? or to watch dogs and people nearby.  But, her fingers in the water kept playing. I might have heard a few notes.  Or it might have been the sandpipers racing at the waters edge, hungry to catch invisible prey only they could hear.  

A dog with three legs ran toward me and then past, intent on the flat wide sand where other dogs were chasing tennis balls flung into the surf.  One of them, fluffy and elderly, a golden retriever on a leash, was spotted by a dancing girl who ran to the dog and circled it, giddy in the bright sun, the sight of the smiling dog, and her own light smallness.  Adults eyed the dog closely, surrounded as he was by the movements of the small girl inclined to pirouette and careen with wild abandon.  The dog might much rather have been hunting ducks in the water hazards where the golfers were yelling, "Fore!" He held his ground and the girl twirled away, a sprite with a bubbling spirit.

A young woman posed between her friend and the wide arch of blonde beach and seething surf, her arms extended like plane wings, digitally captured in as many pixels as waves that broke beyond her.  Once captured, she and her friend checked the image with heads bent together, and the wild smashing currents at Pt Joe took up the dance the small girl had left off.

A Meditation: Waves, Beach

At the western boundary of our coast, the ocean rumbles and thumps.  The closer I get to ocean noise, the better I can think.  Loud water is soothing; waterfalls, showers, heavy rain or pounding surf clarify my thinking and cleanse my mind of distraction.  

The ocean is deadly and has no emotion, and yet it inspires every emotion in the human heart.  One's vision is instantly broadened at land's edge; the sea demands attention, and yet its sound provides a still place for your thoughts, a backdrop of white noise, a meditation.  

The land has a lumpy, undulating edge where it meets the ocean. Granite rock and sandstone is abused by the rush of heavy surf and gentle trickles alike.  Very few people go to the shore who do not stop and gaze at it.  Nearly everyone goes west to that ragged edge of land and feels an inward turn of their mind.  

I saw a small girl who wore lavendar pants and pink rainboots.  She stood on a boulder just past the tide's rush with the look of a person intent on discovery and possibility.  Her hair was tangled and loose in the onshore gusts of cold air, and she looked a wild thing, both old and young all at once, timelessly feminine and unaware of her own potential.  She was quiet while the ocean roared.

The ocean has moods and induces states of mind.  The pace of swells, the size of waves and sometimes the cold slap of wind against your skin excite or soothe your hopes or fears.  What you bring to the shore, you most likely will leave off; fear becomes joy, confidence becomes contentment, or sadness becomes acceptance. 

Maybe it's the incessant sweep of waves or maybe it's that odd feeling of inevitability that a huge ocean's restless energy stirs within you.  Maybe it's the innate knowledge that the ocean and your own blood are nearly the same. The sea has a never-ending quality of movement and changeability, mystery and threat, but also inscrutability.  Every wave is beautiful even though always dependably the same.  

That tension and balance between what is known and what cannot be known, of what is out beyond the surf and what is in your own heart, is a recognition that you and it exist in an infinite continuum.  It's just water out there, but it moves.  It moves and moves you inside but stills you, too, until you cannot be still and must move also.  Even then, compelled to move, you find that the kinetic nature of the ocean has brought you calm and peace, a tranquility you hadn't even been aware was missing until you found it.   

A To-Do Day And Then Tah Dah!

It was a jiggedy day today whose middle was filled with errands and to-dos but it ended in a grand "tah dah!"  It was made of many stepping-stone parts that formed a satisfying whole.  Mondays are often like that; they seem to flop into big chairs and slump with a feeling of "whew, now that was something," like Sunday took all the good things and left junk behind.

First, I swam with friends, back in the pool again finally after a two-week holiday break. Fitness has slipped and I need lots of hours of work to get back in shape.  I had lunch at The Breakfast Club in Seaside where a waitress who was petite, wiry and looked like a roller derby player brought me an enormous plate of salad and a bowl of soup.  It was almost as big as she was.  I saw her staggering along with it and the other plates of food she brought to us.  She needed a U-Haul truck for goodness sake.

Gabriel the New, grand-nephew of minute proportions, age five months, gazed upon his world philosophically until he was handed a big shiny teaspoon.  While I and two loved ones ate our massive lunches, his eyes fixed upon a teaspoon and both hands grasped it with the strength of ten monkeys.  Into his mouth it went, sure as sunrise, for evaluation.  He gummed everything he could find while we talked and caught up on news.  After some good-luck kisses on his soft cheeks, he and his mom said good-bye, to meet again in a week or two.  He is handsome already, and it is assured that girls will find him irresistible, but he will not know they exist, I'll bet.  We shall see.  He has to get out of diapers first.

Friends and errands took up bits and chunks of time until I realized sunset was nearly upon me.  There are many dramatic vistas on our local shores, and today's very low tide produced unusual features of rock, exposed seaweed and stampeding breakers backlit by the setting sun.  Every day, cars and bicycles migrate to the western shore, assembling along Sunset Drive and at Asilomar State Beach.  Clumps of people stand along the walking path or sit in their parked cars to witness the inexorable slow descent of the sun to the horizon and its tatters of gold shredded across the sky.  I don't know how they feel exactly, but in my mind there is music and the Almighty is present in a grand and commanding display.

Asilomar: Rest and Refresh

The sun lifted up out of the Gabilan Mountains to the east, spreading sweet light on the morning.  I woke up hungry and everything looked like food, still felt like summer.  After a succulent brunch of plums, grapes, cheese and Canadian bacon, I finished my mug of coffee and said yes, let's walk at Spanish Bay and Asilomar State Beach, and off we went to the shore west of here.

The ocean was tumbling toward the rocks and sand in a jumble of swells and riptides, lacy streaks of white foam streaming back out oceanward.  The boardwalk that undulates and curves alongside the road was restless with people in motion.  Surfers, tidepool hunters, joggers and cyclists moved silently, as they seem to always in the presence of this jagged restless shore.  Certainly, our own voices were diminished with wind and ocean everywhere booming and sighing.  

Stitching between clots of humans who stood or sat at the beach, always gazing westward at the waves, were dogs, leaping, racing, splashing, circling, busy with all their dog business.  Their smiles were huge and their tongues flapped like pink flags in the breeze.

Circling back up off the beach after walking southward first, we found the boardwalk again, lined with sweet-smelling chaparral and feral nasturtiums, to the Phoebe Hearst Social Hall at the Asilomar Conference Center.

Julia Morgan, a prolific architect, designed and built hundreds of buildings including the YWCA retreat center, a conference center now, a testament to her ability to merge manmade structures with nature, using local building materials.

In the hall, stone, burnished wood and the fragrance of a glowing pine fire in the giant hearth invite restful reflection and offer retreat from the shoving and jangle of our crowded world.  Guests and visitors find the room both spacious and peaceful, a place to play the grand piano, practice billiards, read, write or sit in conversation with a companion.  Simply gazing out of the tall old window panes into the woods surrounding the area refreshes the mind and soul, too.  TV and telephones are absent throughout the conference grounds.  Murmuring voices, clicking billiard sticks, and piano notes become the white noise of this very special place.

Serenity and calm are made three dimensional in this hall.  Wind, sand, trees and ocean, so close by as to be indistinguishable from the grounds themselves, wait restlessly nearby, vital counterpoints to the organic majesty of the buildings of Asilomar.