Morning Sea
I go for a walk before breakfast, before anything. I walk through the park which is full of trees, it is a forest really, mainly pine. There are paths through this forest but this park does not belong to humans, it belongs to these magnificent trees. I head towards the sea. There are many paths from the forest park, to the beach. The paths turn into boardwalks, easier to climb up the slope of the dunes. I’m not the first on the beach, but there are not many people. The wind is brisk and cold.
As I’m leaving, returning to the forest park by another path, I see someone back on the shore, wearing only a bikini, walking towards the sea, then into it, and her body gradually becomes immersed in the water.
People stroll along the beach, warmly wrapped against the cold wind. The past 2 days – I've only been here 2 days – there has been a strong wind blowing. In the mornings, the sun is high up in the sky, a bright light in a field of blue. Sometimes there are a few feathery grasses in this field, pale wisps like remembered dreams, faint, provocative, blanched or curled, with a desire swept almost into oblivion, into its own culmination or annihilation. To be consumed, obliterated by joy isn't that what we always long for?
The sky has been scoured by the wind of all traces of rebellion, it is swept lovingly into the domain of blue.
That is the morning weather, morning outlook. A fierce and agile sea, a sky with the faintest white silk of dreams, pressed over, swept over, until it relinquishes all longings into blue.
*
The sea has many different moods and colours. Today it is raining but there is little wind. For the past 2 days there have been strong winds by the sea, cold air and deep blue sea colours, reflecting blue sky. Today the water is greenish-grey, the sky has different shades of grey and on the horizon to the north west, near the pier, there is a luminescent glow.
These colours are shifting and subtle, there is something deeply welcoming and familiar about the sea today, it is as if the rain has softened everything.
 |
| Spot the geese, flying south |
Evening sea
There are rows of undulating boardwalks that form a network between the woods and the shore, sloping up over the dunes.
The sun takes a long time to go down. There are rows of benches at the end of the pier. People are sitting there, a rapt audience, to watch the setting sun. It is a gathering place, there’s a sense of community.
I walk out along the pier and on the northern side, fishermen in front of their rods, which dangle from the sides of the pier which is a long wooden bridge that goes out to sea. A crow sits between two fishermen, as if they were friends, gathered together. Perhaps they are. When I stopped for a while, to look out to sea and the changing colours of the sky, the crow perched close to me too. I think it was the same one. Perhaps it just likes to hang out with people.
Black-headed gulls dive down to the sea surface, plucking at it, rise again, dip down again. I don’t know if they find any fish there but there seems to be something just below the surface which draws them.
Comments