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There is a toast in Spanish that is “amor, salud y plata y tiempo para gastarlo” – love, health and money and time to waste them. We got news recently that our friend in Spain who has all the love in the world and money enough has hit a major milestone with his cancer. This news has weighed heavy on T’s heart since we’ve been here and this evening, I walked on the beach in the gloaming light that was iridescent as it reflected off the oil slicks washing ashore and I felt melancholy thinking of the passage of death in our lives.

I watched a sandpiper stepping in and out of the water as if nothing was wrong in the world at all.

Good night beach house:

I could write you a 1,000 word essay right now on why I need the beach to get myself centered, I could start with a website and call it Ineedthebeach.com and I could even write a haiku like this:

Yes, I need the beach
Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall
NEED it, I tell you

And I could wax on and on about why the beach is just about the best place in the world to find renewal because the ocean is vast and the beaches are long, and the sun rises and sets right next to you.

But instead, why I need the beach is summed up in the smiles on these faces and mine:

I’m engrossed in this Cognitive Surplus book because it speaks to my heart that is it provides case studies that when people are given a task to do, they perform it because they want to but when they are compensated for it, it diminishes the autonomy and motive for doing it. I thought about this with my own blogging. A colleague had told me to focus on my fiction writing not blogging. I mean who gets paid from blogging? Hardly anyone. But there is a lot of blogging still going on. I came across an old source of mine blogging away even though he has been in his industry for more than three decades and certainly doesn’t need to do something like that and he is paid handsomely in his work. But he was speaking about things that he is passionate about and it compelled him to blog, for no compensation.

I can think of other blogger friends who blog about their life taking all of us who read their entries on their path to self-enlightenment and self-actualization. You, the reader, join in voluntarily, no one is obligated here – no one has to blog, no one has to read, it just is. It’s sort of an amazing concept.

Our beach trip has been an exploration in fruit eating – Tin has eaten and asked for apples and mangos and eaten every bite. He was strictly an applesauce boy but he is venturing out here on the beach with the fresh air and sun making all of us very content. He is also jamming with Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and Trombone Shorty. We watched him perform for about forty five minutes last night and he was unstoppable. No one was paying him for his performance either.

The morning walk on the beach showed evidence of the BP Oil Spill disaster and it put me in mind of how much we are in a time of large transitions in our lifetime. BP’s screw up and the government’s screw up with Katrina and Rita, or our federal government’s inability to predict or defend the terrorist attacks on 9/11 – so many huge things happening. I’m reading a good book called Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, which is about another sea change going on in our lives right now and that is a surge in people doing things without getting paid for them. A very interesting thesis.

It made me think this morning of my friend in Florida documenting the shoreline by blogging about it, just in case it wasn’t going to be around. So this morning I chimed in with my observations here on Ft. Morgan – behold oil slicks coming on shore up and down the beach (sticks to your feet):

Jellyfish dead on the shore up and down the beach:

Dead fish washing ashore and being pecked by seabirds (who seem to not have oil):

A colleague friend was chatting with me yesterday and referred me to the psalms in the Old Testament. I was thinking about psalms this morning and how beautiful some of them are, but I have to say I meditated on this one this morning instead:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

A PSALM OF LIFE

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real!   Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

****

Here is a photograph that my mom gave to a sweetheart when she was young – Love Always, Pat

When we first came to Ft. Morgan we rented a friend’s house that was walking distance from the beach. The next time we came with friends who we shared a house with just about a block or two from the beach. We kept coming back to that house or the one next to it in different configurations but always with another couple because of the cost of the house. But T kept saying she wanted to get on the beach and so I kept searching for an opportunity, but most of the houses were either too expensive or didn’t allow dogs. Then we got a tip from a friend who rented from a new site and we went to it and found this place – Valhalla we will call it because it is on the beach, two bedrooms, and just perfect for us and the dogs.

Never mind that we have to divide our long walks with the dogs between morning and evening so that one of us is with Tin – who will walk but a long walk is the equivalent of one sandpiper’s tracks in the sand. But here is where we find our repose, facing the water, the Gulf in this case, and white sand, and long stretches of beach. Pelicans are cruising by as I write this sitting at the kitchen table looking out to the ocean; yesterday T saw dolphins cruising by.

This is us stopping for a snack after missing the ferry:

This is our new place on the beach, where right now a huge orange and black butterfly is sailing by the window:

I met a source and friend of mine for dinner on Wednesday night and when we arrived at the restaurant I learned the owner’s dad had just passed suddenly. He said his mother was holding his father because he didn’t feel well all of a sudden and his father turned to her and said, “I love you.” And then died. My dinner date said that she had just been to a funeral on Monday, a grand second line and celebration funeral of a 35 year old woman (who reminds me of you, she turned to me and said, she has that making her own way attitude that you have) who had thrown herself off the Mississippi River Bridge.

I thought about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the gull who is forced by his nature to make his own way and then becomes outcast from the flock, only later to find others who believe as he does, that perfecting knowledge is the goal and his desire to fly could now be taught to others. The 35 year old woman’s desire to fly culminated in her dying. I’m not interested in that except in a metaphysical way.

If in dying, I can be reborn, I’m all about it but even the flying I’m doing in acro yoga is scary and unnerving. Forcing myself into it because I need to is the part of me that wants to fly, while resistance is the part of me that is scared to fly. You can spend a lifetime trying to overcome your fear of flying, or you succumb to the fear and dive into oblivion.

I woke yesterday morning to a text from the nanny that she had gotten a ride to Phoenix instead. And I smiled, by the time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising played through my head for the rest of the morning. We were leaving later to head to a beach house, where taking similar steps to last year, when we fled to the beach for Thanksgiving, we were fleeing a gris gris that has stricken me as of late. We smudged the whole house, and we left having everything in order towards the later part of the day and when we arrived at Dauphin Island, the ferry wasn’t running. The wind was whipping up when I got out of the car to make sure it wasn’t running. Now to backtrack, and take the long way to the beach.

For all the to and fro that came with renting this place – two misplaced checks, one bank wire, one aborted air travel, and now a ferry missed, I was starting to wonder if like the nanny had said at the airport when I went to get her, it wasn’t meant to be. We opened the door of the beach house and it was like a great whoosh was heard – negativity out, positive in. And later we had arrived just in time for sunset and watched the fiery red horizon turn to pink and purple.

Then this morning after a ten hour uninterrupted sleep, I walked on the beach with Loca and Heidi. There were no footsteps on the sand, I was the first animal out this morning to mark the windswept shoreline. Loca and Heidi frollicked and chased the shore birds while a multitude of brown and white pelicans nose dived for morning breakfast.

There is still a trace of something on my mind – the approach of mom’s anniversary of her death, the uncertainty that clings to everything, and yet, this morning I decided to think as if I have already arrived.

Yesterday when my nanny was trying to board the plane with the voucher ticket I had booked for her and they wouldn’t let her on because somehow though the reservation was in her name, the ticket was in my name. The United clerks were disinterested in customer service – which I reminded them was not in keeping with their new corporate mandate. Meanwhile, we tried to get her on a Southwest flight where the clerks were nothing but nice, but alas the prices were just too high. And so there in was one more of these mishaps, missteps, missed somethings that has been happening around me for the past few weeks.

So this morning, we smudged the house to eradicate the negativity – the ruined dress, the defunct computer, the heart out of rhythm, the beach/nanny travel fuck-ups, and the you name it. Done. We walked room to room, corner to corner, with thick herbal smoke fumigating the entire LaLa to rid ourselves of anything but peace, love, health and harmony.

We’re headed to the beach this weekend and there we will also concentrate on getting ourselves aligned, or at least I will, since I’m the one out of line. T’s happy because she sent her final draft for her book off to the publisher and T2’s happy as long as he has his trumpet and a mirror to perform in front of, so now it’s time for R to get happy (the dogs will be happy when they see the beach – the cats happy they have the house to themselves). Happy Happy Joy Joy.