Return to the Sea

What is it about the sea, especially one as dark and brooding as this, that steals the darkness and melancholy from our souls and leaves us in peace with a calm heart and clear mind? The ocean has always been magic for me, so I leapt at the opportunity to spend the weekend with good friends creating new art, walking the beach and doing a bit of writing on the side.

Mother Nature, too, was busy at creating her art. This bright bit of color in an otherwise dark gray day, was laying in the sand after being washed up by the tide and yet, it appears to be a found art collage of flotsam and jetsam crafted by a careful hand.

Or the abstract reflections of clouds and sea on the sand with the small calligraphic marks left by sea pebbles. Seems to be too perfect to have been created by happenchance. Everywhere I looked there was beauty and to walk in beauty, in Navajo tradition, is to have a balanced soul. The weekend ended in rain that appeared to wash the world clean of the remaining whispers of winter to make way for Spring. The daffodils nodded in agreement as they danced to the rhythm of the wind.

A Weekend at the Coast

Sunset at Lincoln City

A curious seal

Sun break on the ocean

Siletz Bay tree

Happy dog chasing the seals

Crow's feet

Lincoln City Beach

Another sunset view

***

I just returned from the Central Coast of Oregon where I took a class in Writing and Selling Nature Essays at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. The class was taught by Melissa Hart, a professor at University of Oregon, who also teaches an online class in memoir writing for University of California, Berkeley. Her class was amazing - she taught so much in a short six hours and was very generous in sharing her resources. Eight women from Oregon and Washington, some new to writing, others already published, attended the class and shared stories together in this peaceful and remote area, with a stunning view from every window. We learned that vision is our strongest sense and tends to dominate our stories. So we left the classroom and went outside into the trees and closed our eyes to hear the birds and the distant thunder of the ocean waves, used our fingers to feel the soft, velvet moss on rough tree bark, and used our noses to smell and taste the salted pine air and pungent loam beneath our feet. After the class, I drove to Lincoln City and walked the beach, searching for treasure and enjoying the sun as it set behind a fog bank. After spending the night, I left to explore other beaches in the area, stopping at Siletz Bay where I watched a happy dog chase a herd of sea lions off their cozy sand beach and into the cold waters. All too soon it was time to go home, but rather than my normal route, I chose to meander slowly through the slow back roads, exploring towns I had never been to before and did not know existed. There is so much of the world we don't know and miss in our travels over the interstate. Yet, in these places, history is alive and once experienced, stay in our hearts forever.