Discovery Drafts

This week's post looks a lot like last week's post--except that it doesn't.  Last week's sunrise came after the rain, but not this one.  This was one of those mornings that start gray and seem to promise soft light and rain but evolve into a day of azure bliss.  I love the beach:  it's vast and sure and endless.  There's nothing like it:  it's the story of the first day.  It is every day. Skywatch Friday

A dear friend who visited the Black Sea following her summer vacation with her sons and her mother in Transylvania brought home this sea turtle fashioned from little sea shells. She gave him to me and said he made her think of me while she was away.  I put the turtle on a photo of Topsail that Adella had printed for her dorm.  I have been immersed in the works of Joseph Campbell this summer, so his ideas informed the text, which Ed added for me. As Adella has gone off to college to follow her bliss, I have been wondering about mine.  And thinking about turtles on the beach.  And I have been wondering about those turtles, so many of whom have emerged from their nests without the witness of tender-hearted retirees and vacationers because the storms and the lightning have made the beach at night a secret, primordial space. Who goes there?  Indeed. Our World Tuesday

Last week, Adella and I stole away to Topsail before she had to get ready for college.  It was a magical time of breezes, sunshine, humidity, heat, and a thunderstorm that, as my father would say, would make a believer out of you.   I took this photo the morning after that storm.  I had a lovely walk on some packed-down sand into the cool air.  It was interesting for me to watch the early morning unfold:  surf-casters were out there with their fishing poles, dog people were playing catch, turtle people were keeping the beach right, sandpipers were hunting for breakfast, and there I was in my sneakers making the same walk I had made every day we had been there.  How was this possible after several hours of excruciating thunder, lightning, wind, and rain? Why didn't the world look  different?  Feel different?  Make us stop and wait and do something to show we noticed what had happened the night before? The hard sand of that morning made me think of the words of one o

Wordless Wednesday

A few years back, I met a turtle lady who had given up her day job so that she could be free to sit turtle nests into the late night during the summer and fall.  She decided to clean houses so that she could set her own schedule and be free to do what was important to her.  She was following her bliss; to this day, she is my hero. I have witnessed and helped with a few hatchings over the years, and I had hoped to be a part of at least one this year when my daughter and I returned to Topsail for a week.  It’s a profoundly wonderful experience--one well worth the sacrifice of a day job. This summer, sea turtles created 144 nests on Topsail Island, a sea turtle sanctuary off the southern coast of North Carolina.  When Adella and I arrived last Sunday, we met two turtle ladies and a neighbor, who were on their way back from assessing a nest that had hatched three days earlier.  They told us they had found 18 unfertilized eggs, a number of pips (hatchlings that died while climbin

The morning in this photo follows a night of.  (There goes that dysphasia again.)   It was a night of thunder and lightning.  (Dysphasia = I am thinking.  It is not a disorder but an experience of being deeply engaged with the world around me, which requires my understanding that I am not the center of the world but a part of it.  This is not a political statement, except that it is.)  The night of thunder and lightning precluded my being at the turtle nest where the eggs are due to hatch within the next few days.  Electrocution does not appeal to me. Back to the morning in this photo, though.  Into it walked myriad fisherpeople with their little wagons of fish food and human snacks and possibly beer.  Into it walked the Mormons and their bazillion relatives in solar-safe swimwear that might have passed for burqinis--except.  They're Mormons.  They read from a different book that reads metaphor as literal truth. It's interesting that competing mythologies strive for the sam

On the line between Watertown and Woodbury, Connecticut, are three metal sculptures of eagles and the invitation to take photos.  One eagle bears the US flag and dog tags; it carries the message of grief and patriotism and honor.  The other two eagles on a scrap of Connecticut farmland are all muscle and power and intention. They're beautiful.  I would love to know who created them, how he learned the craft, how he came to so passionately create eagles. I would love to learn these things in a conversation free of the party politics of the hour.  I believe that the patriotism that drives the artist is the patriotism that drives me.   It deserves a stronger voice. When Ed and I stopped to take pictures a few weeks ago, a non-English-speaking Slavic family also stopped for pictures.  Unlike us, they posed with the eagles. I watched them and thought of my Google news feed and the stories of Putin and Snowden and doping.  That was one world.  The world where I live and fam

Wordless Wednesday