Went for a walk on the beach this evening. It looks like I will be moving to a place without beaches soon, so I am trying to enjoy the one here as much as possible now. I took it for granted earlier, as people often do with their environments when they have lived in them a while. When I lived in DC, I took a lot of the monuments, museums, and history for granted.
We saw a guy on the beach meditating. I had seen him there before. He was in an Asian meditating position, I think it’s a Buddhist one, sitting with legs crossed and hands held on his knees with palms upwards. Meditation doesn’t work very well for me, but I agree with the goal of calmness and focus. For me, thinking of series of words and prepared text is better to bring order and calm.
There are two brief poems about the sea and the beach that I like in particular. The first is actually a song by U2 called “The Ocean” (an aside, my Mom, an editor, has pointed out there is an important difference between the words “ocean” and “sea”):
A picture in grey
Dorian Gray
Just me by the sea
And I felt like a star
I felt the world could go far
If they listened
To what I said, the sea
Washes my feet
Washes the feet
Splashes the soul of my shoes
The other is by E.E. Cummings, or e.e. cummings, as the case may be:
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is also a stirring and distressing but also oddly calming poem about a waterfront that you can find on poets.org.