Tumbling Rocks, Storm Surf

Walking in the salt-tinged rain this morning brought us to our senses.  Or rather, it brought our senses more to life.  We heard the loud crack of giant rocks banging and clacking in the surf while cold drizzle coated our jackets and faces.  The tossing and tilting waves spewed salt-laden mist heavy with kelp, fish and wet earth.  Debris thrown on the walking path crunched under our feet like glass.

The ocean's watery hand is violent and unrelenting in its insistent pounding.  Life and death intertwine, trading places often.  There is no room for weakness or ambivalence when the tide rises and waves are roaring.  Some parts of the shore are piled up with shredded heaps of kelp ripped up during the last storm.  It lies in acrid mounds, rotting and decaying, washing back into the surf in shreds and bits.

Shore birds unable to dodge and lift above breakers are broken themselves.  Cracked shells and legs of sand crabs, anemones and mollusks have been scattered by both waves and other stronger birds.  Constantly, the smacking whump of wave after wave continues, beating hard against slowly eroding granite rocks.  As if forming a zone of indecision,  loose boulders roll from the earth to the water and back again, and you can hear the crackling boom as they are pushed by tons of water.

The potent and primal admixture of cool misty air, rough dark rocks and tumbling waves reduces all things to a struggle between life and death, a drama that continues from dark to light and dark again, ceaselessly.

The Gravity of the Scene

I was rummaging around in the flower pots, my head down and my sleeves catching on the twigs and thorns on the rose bushes.  I had to squat down to reach a recalcitrant weed and it seemed gravity was working overtime when I had to stand again, but I made it.  I stood there surveying my work and heard the electronic-sounding squeaks of hummingbirds nearby.  They jetted from perch to perch, one elongated thorn with wings and a ferocious demeanor.  They are like miniature Inigo Montoyas from The Princess Bride, wrapped in iridescent feathers, challenging each other, all at 200 mph.  "I am one ounce of feathers, you took my perch, prepare to die!"

Other birds, twittering on nearby perches, looked awkward and slow in comparison to the hummers.  A female titmouse, rumpled and molty, held still as the tiny aggressors darted back and forth near her.

I went back to work weeding, pruning and then dragging the hose around to water plants and finally sweeping up.  It was steady methodical work.  Overhead, the sun was playing coyly with the pashmina-like fog wisps. They tumbled together in a very slow silent ballet.

Done with my work, I faced north from the front of the house and looked out across Monterey Bay.  The water's surface was scuffed by the onshore breeze from northwest to southeast and set the whole bay moving.   Beyond the bay, past the shreddy scarves' edges, layers of storm clouds were piling up against the hills of Watsonville and Corralitos.  All the sky, the ocean, birds, everything moved elegantly and inexorably, and I stood stock still in the middle of it all like a peg in a board, my feet rooted to the ground.

All the moving parts looked like a child's spinning lampshade painted with a diorama, but in truth I was standing on this big blue ball moving at a thousand miles an hour, the one we call Earth.  Time flattened out and space became visible.  I had a sense of the relative positions of the planets and moon and sun, and the earth revolving very rapidly, all of them locked in a dance through eternity, a rotating frenzy of molecules, matter and mass.  I, the very puny human, stood agape at it all.

Hummingbirds zapped past my head at light speed, and I imagined myself one of them, but all that sound and motion made me feel the pull of gravity under my shoes more than ever.  My legs felt stretched and my arms lifted away from my sides a bit as if weightless.  I sensed that without the glue of gravity under my feet, I'd be tumbling away into intergalactic space like a rag doll.

I looked down at my shoes, scuffed and muddy, very much on the ground.  I felt like Dorothy with her ruby slippers:   "There's no glue like gravity, there's no glue like gravity..."  A little bit of vertigo goes a long way.  I'd had a quick glimpse at the machinations of nature relative to my own position on terra firma. That's all it was, but those forces are immense, formidable and really magnificent.