Most mornings on the Cape, I am up and out of the house before anyone awakes. I grab my journal bag and my hat and stop for a cappuccino to go on my way to the water. Depending on the weather and my mood, I head for the ocean or the nearby bay.
The closest you can come to claiming a beach is to arrive at dawn. The beach stretches out empty in all directions, quiet, foggy, still, with only the gulls and the sound of the surf as company. Some mornings, the ocean beaches are cold and wet and windy and stripped of color. There is no definition between water and sky as both merge into a great, grey cotton boll of moisture. Other mornings, the beach is soft and gentle, with the sun a rising ball of crimson that blushes all it touches. The wind is briny and tastes of oysters and the sand is cold and foreign to my feet. Whether raining or blustery or humid or breezy, it is bracing and bouyant and scoured of all human traces.
Bliss distilled.
I know my sisters didn't completely understand this pull I felt to leave my bed while the curls of fog are still around the tops of the fir trees. I'm afraid they found my disappearance each morning peculiar and anti-social. But it is what I dream of all year: watching the sky lighten, the breeze whistling past my ears, bringing the sounds of buoys and gulls and blessed, blessed silence.
Sometimes I don't even get of my car for an hour, just sit wordless as the blurry world emerges and I witness the sky and water cleave apart to form a perfect bowl of blue and reflecting saucer of ocean green. By then, it is amusing to be startled from my solitude by a fisherman walking out of the seagrass with a striped bass as big as his leg and to be reminded that I am not alone in my taste for the raw beginning of the day. Eventually, I begin to draw and write and when I am done with my own thoughts, I venture out to walk the surfline or onto the tidal flats.
The early morning beach is my House of God. It is His majesty in all it's presence. The Father of Spirit, the Mother of Soul, the elemental Mystery infused in water and sky. It is the mystical Presence bound up in every spray of salt, of every grain of polished sand, of every glint of light across the water, and each spray of foam into the air.
I am a better person when I start the day at the edge of the tide, my feet squelching in the primordial sand, wading through water that holds millions of creatures, that feeds and stews and boils and births and cleanses with the gravitational pull twice a day.
Treasure and mystery abound in the wrack line. All that the tide leaves behind is mine for the exploring, but I leave most of it in place for the next creature to discover. Perhaps it will become a home to another creature in need and remain a piece of the collage of the bay.
The older I get, the more I need this solitude and it is such a rare treat that I have to relish in it at the beginning of a day. I crave it like sweet wine to a drunk. Am I developing those eccentricities we observe in the aging; those subtle tics of personality that ripen into knobby growths as fixed as bunions and arthritic joints? Have I become the woman that wanders the beach at dawn, the woman who prefers that sweet slice of the day over any other part?
It is only in that solitude by the water that I feel I am living my authentic life. It is the only time when I know I am in connection with what I am supposed to be doing. It is when my great thoughts come to me, when the creativity arises unbidden, and when I begin to see my way clear of all the flotsam and jetsam that clogs my brain.
So I become possessed on vacations to immerse myself in that solitude, to soak up the essence of being still, of observing the water and the way it ripples and to become so familiar with the tides that I can feel in my cells the exact moment when there is no pull between high and low, the slack water, the exact moment when the tide stands still twice a day before it turns.
When I can start the day this way, I am a better person for it. I will treat you more kindly, be more patient, loving, and giving. I can take you sightseeing, fix you meals, wash your sandy towels, and sit with you elbow to elbow on the beach dotted with umbrellas, and listen to screaming children, not be able to smell the ocean for the deep fried onion rings, and still be relaxed and smiling.
I can leave my writing back at the house, put away my sketchbook, and not feel the pull to be elsewhere, to be doing other, to feel as though my life is constantly subverted from its true path. I can be all things to you as long as you give me that part of the day to me.
It is in that moment of slack water that I want to live. It is what I seek all year: that moment when no one needs me, when there is nothing else I should be doing, when I don't have to feel guilty, stressed, harried, or frenzied and then, then, I will write and paint.
I know how easy it is to go out on the ebb tide and how hard it is to wade back against the current. It is impossible to remain in balance, poised, and complete. Life is either overfull or draining away. Blessings come in abundance or not at all. The tidal flats fill and empty each day without remorse, without regret to the creatures it strands, frantically scrambling to catch up to the water or burrowing into the sand to await its return.
This is who I am: the woman seeking slack water.