Pausing For A Moment

It's Fall. We had Winter all Summer and now have Summer in Autumn. Today was one of the most beautiful days of the year, equal to any wonderful summer day of gilded childhood memory, but it's October. Shouldn't it be cool and crisp?

I can hear the ocean waves pounding all around the edges of Pacific Grove, a low rumbling continuous heart beat, a steady hum of energy.  I stop to think for a moment and realize that the waves have been rushing and foaming exactly that way since forever.  Nothing has changed about that. Except that the ocean is continually changing the shore, grain by grain of sand. So, in constancy there is change. It has been a light-on-the-heart day. I loved it.

This is my 555th post, kind of a cool number. It's hard to believe I've written that much. I guess when I reach 1,000 I'll have a party. Thank you for taking time to read my stuff.

Sand in a Stream

A small stream flows across a bed of rough sand.  It's bordered by small dunes, an old tree whose roots are broken and gray, weatherbeaten; they dangle above a nearby embankment.  A strong fast boy could make a running leap across the stream without getting wet if he wanted to.

As the water flows across the sand, it seems certain and constant, predictable in its straight and shallow bed.  When one takes a closer look at the streambed, tiny movements of the grains of sand, tumbling from one place to another downstream an inch or two are visible.  Each pebble that moves slightly alters the flow of water, but surely the water's force cannot be overcome by one or two grains of sand.  Or can they?

If you sit and watch the water for a long time, you begin to see tiny cave-ins of the water's edges, and that some grains are slightly larger than others.  Some stick together longer than others and others pile up against them until a more secure obstruction is formed.  These are subtle shifts, small influences on the flow of the moving stream as it stretches across the sand, but they do alter the flow, and when the stream has to shift direction ever so gently, other changes occur.  Every small change causes another, and changes are endless.

Sometimes, randomly it seems, tiny landslides tumble into the water, or cave-ins of sand slump into the water's edge, a few cupfuls of sand all at once.  The nature of water is such that in its fluidity, deflection occurs or pooling of depth, and force is distributed differently; the stream alters its course.

The stream I watched, small and insignificant as it was, acted as a metaphor for me.  I watched it stream out to the ocean across the beach sand and spent some time looking at the changes that the flow of water caused as it exerted force on the banks of wet sand.  I saw that the flow of water was moving sand along the bottom little by little so that it looked stable at first glance but really was always changing, shifting and readjusting.

When we live and interact as humans, we are much like a stream with its shifts in depth, direction and alterations in its boundary zones.  A change in mood or new idea turns us in subtly new directions, and we must allow for change, absorb it and respond fluidly to be able to continue functioning.  Often, the tiniest pebbles' movements in a stream of water eventually confer large shifts because one movement of one single pebble redistributes force, a force that may be just what is needed downstream to turn the tide, so to speak, in favor of the stream flowing more to one side than the other.

We don't really ever know how much our work or mood or ideas change things around us.  It could be said that consistency of effort makes a bigger difference.  Or it may be said that one big effort is much more important to the world we live in.  The truth is that no matter what we do or think or how we move or act, it affects the world, if in no other way but energy or force being exerted on the universe and the universe having to respond.

The Face of Change

When nothing becomes something, does god laugh?  Emergence and change are constants in nature, artifacts of forces and substances intermingling in a dance that sets its own pace regardless of our observance.

A stone grew teeth, or seemed to when I saw it.  Big laughing teeth jutting right up out of the ground.

At the moment that I recognized the stone to have teeth, I became interested in it.  Until the very moment of being recognized, it was just stone, plain and simple.  Igneous rock sandwiched between sedimentary rocks, substances formed over a span of time we are barely able to conceive, form the grin.  It's easy to see the bits of things they are made of, but now those things are becoming something else.  They have never stopped changing and never will.  

I once recognized Clint Eastwood driving in his Mercedes in Monterey.  Until the moment his face became a face I could identify, he was just a driver in a green car at an intersection taking his turn to pass through.  Ho hum.  After the surprise of recognition, the moment became important, and I talked about it to a friend.

I wondered what else changed, but now I know that the simpler question is what did not change because the answer is:  Nothing.  All of every single thing changes all the time.  Force and substance always do their dance together.

Former classmates from high school have faces that time has weathered and gravity has worked on.  I feel my mind clanging through data banks, opening drawers and closing them quickly in a search of a match with old images captured long ago.  "Is that...?  No, can't be."  But it is.  A face once solidly familiar has changed and become nearly entirely unfamiliar.  

Children you first saw when they were born and last saw when they were two walk up to you in high heels 15 years later and say hello, and your mind does a stutter step as it looks for a familiar landmark on the face before you, one that identifies this young woman as the same child you last saw in diapers a short time ago.  A blink of an eye, and everything seems different.  I wonder if it's me changing, rushing through time while everything else stands still.  It feels like that.

Old trees and landmarks seem imperturbable and abide changes, show us how to do the same.  I stand next to old trees and think that they have seen a lot, endured much, withstood change every minute of their lives.  Strong and gnarled old trees, warriors dancing in the wind, defy the forces around them but change constantly in spite of themselves.  

The toothed rocks will be there for a long time I imagine. I just saw them for the first time.  They seemed the very grin of god.  I wanted there to be eyes, too, and a big resounding laugh that would echo off the hillsides and roll up into the clouds.  What's next to emerge, what will come into being and what will be lost eventually?  I happened on a grinning rock that laughed for having emerged, whether I was there or not.  Knowing it's there, I smile too.