At the beach for a day and a half. Empty, desolate, with big unbroken shells. For no one is collecting them. The sun filtering though tattered clouds of endless varieties of grey with orange and turquoise shadows. Broken reflections in the water, adding even more imperfect beauty, always on the move. Everything flows. A big young brown seagull sees a flock of grey-white seagulls and lands among them, awkwardly. He knows something doesn’t match up, but decides to stay anyway. Why are there so many seagulls grouping together, when they have the whole beach and the endless sky at their whim? After a few minutes, a man comes out, he carries a bag of food. Of course! Remarkably only about half of the gulls care. Bellies still full from bounty found elsewhere. Life can be that awesome and simple.

The next day, there was no bright light, just a diffuse glow of the sky, water and land in subdued tones. Thick grey strokes of oily clouds covered the entire sky. It was the day of the moving sands. First, the ocean laid down the sands and shells, mostly broken, in infinite swirling layers, like a stack of old manuscripts. And then the sands grind themselves down, whipped up by a blustery wind. The wind was so strong that the surf was obliterated and the ocean was a grey flat whirling sheet, only in the far distance did it turn green and were the white curls of angry little waves visible. I could see the lashing tongues of fluid sand coming at the other sand like clansmen seeking revenge on their own kin. Wind sand vs Water sand. The effect was no less beautiful. The interplay created mini Grand Canyon cliff sides and dune scapes of tiny dunes, with ripples of sticky Water sand interspersed with Wind sand, which was white, dried by the wind. I know now why the ancients thought of four primordial elements: Water, Wind, Earth, and Fire. Water and Wind shape everything, except Life. And Fire adds warmth, and light needed for Life, yet always lurking to burn it down again. Fire comes from the sky or it comes from the belly of the Earth, but to really burn it needs Life. 

In the morning an old lady waddled out to the surf. In spite of the cold, her ankles were bare and her feet stuck in a type of Crocs, which added to the waddling effect. She was serious about shells. Do you ever wonder why birds don’t seem to get cold feet? They do, they just don’t notice it. So it must have been with this grand dame of shells. Noone else came, except me. I was rewarded in many ways, witnessing destruction, beauty and transcience in rapid pace. And by a pair of dolphins that jumped out of the water, playing. Oblivious, or perhaps deliberate. 

In a storm, cows point their rear toward the wind, so you can always tell the direction the wind is coming from, as long as there are outdoor cows. The seagulls on the beach do it the other way. They point toward the storm. It makes sense. Sticking your head in the wind, is about the same effect as flying fast, I suppose. Nature’s aerodynamics. The Ocean is always awesome, even more so on a blustery, rainy day.