Skywatch Friday: When Moody is a Good Thing

There's nothing quite like a day that starts with promises of rain but not with certainty. The play of light and color is beautiful.

Breakage

BY MARY OLIVER

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

       full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story. 

Skywatch Friday

Skywatch Friday: Happy New Year

In November, Coastal Living ran an excellent essay by author Jonathan Miles, "Forgotten Beaches."  I have saved the essay because I like to reread the last paragraph, part of which reads:  

[A] beach is a state of mind.  It's a child's brain igniting from the wonder of the land's edge, from the immensity of the landless horizon.  It's glancing up from a novel to glimpse the magnitude ofthe Earth.  It's lifting an upside-down plastic bucket to reveal a castle made of sand, the fortress fora fleeting beachfront civilization.  It'ss the sand-encrusted, sun-roasted, slightly barbecued feeling at the close of a shoreline day.  It's the way an ice-cream stand appears like a roadside oasis on the way home, the way  a soft-serve cone feels like the antidote to an overdose of sun and water, pleasure remedying pleasure.  We go to the beach, in some ways to liberate ourselves from the distinctions of life, because at the water's edge we are all rendered the same:  supplicants of happiness.  The beach itself does not matter.  Joy does.

Wishing you every joy in the New Year!

Skywatch Friday

Wordless Wednesday: The Comfort and Joy of Light

Wordless Wednesday

Our World Tuesday: The Beach

Adella and I have spent the past several days on Topsail.  We celebrated Christmas a week early so that we could hit the road and enjoy the beach and trade in the jail stripes of public education for these dune fence stripes.  She brought so much homework, though, that we spent many an hour with her working on that.  One big AP history project took about 25 hours.  It was crazy.  I was the sous chef, printing pictures for the timeline and getting out the markers for her and making very insightful commentary on the hair styles of the Forgettable Presidents for her.  (In short:  there were many, many ways to do a comb-over in the 19th century.  I am almost sorry I missed it.)

Christmas night we drove around to enjoy the nautical Christmas decorations.  These pelicans are among my favorite.  They perch atop a little pedestrian bridge in Surf City.   Later that evening, I assigned myself a little pelican homework and discovered the movie Pelican Dreams, which I am intent on seeing somehow.  Dudes have been around for 30 million years, and they deserve a little consideration.

The other morning, Adella and I got up with the sun to go for a walk.  She doesn't talk too much, and I like that a lot in a walking companion.  She's a great kid, and she likes to photograph Topsail, too.  How not to?

Check out this beautiful trailer for Pelican Dreams:

Our World Tuesday

Skywatch Friday:

I watched a family of swans and a beaver swim by this pond last Saturday.  The peace they left behind was priceless.  Here's some great Christmas music from The Piano Guys to go along with this image:



Skywatch Friday