One morning in Provincetown we drove out to Herring Cove Beach, where we used to spend days at the beach when the kids were small. The waves here on the bay side are more gentle than they are on the beaches facing the open Atlantic. When they got older they preferred the excitement of Race Point Beach. This beach is pretty rocky, lots of small stones, making trips in and out of the water rough on tiny feet.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
~ E. E. Cummings
(The Lyric Self in Zen & E. E. Cummings)
It was fun photographing the gulls sunning themselves in a different background than the large rocks they usually perch on at our local beach. The future is always uncertain, but lately possible scenarios seem to be monopolizing my thoughts, creating anxiety even as I try to stay living in the present. Spending so much time on the Cape has helped me restore a sense of peace with things as they are or will prove to be. It’s not so much a feeling of resignation, but more of an accepting of the inevitable flux and flow of life.
When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(Letter to Clara Rilke, March 27, 1903)
I know that my brain grows quiet when I visit the shore. Perhaps it’s not that it grows quiet but rather that the waves drown out the sounds of my prattling thoughts. BTW we have a “Herring Cove” here too but it’s not lovely and sandy like yours. Ours is a fishing village inlet about 15 km from Halifax.
It’s those prattling thoughts that get the better of me, too, Sybil. It’s so hard to stop thinking and stop believing all the dumb things my mind is feeding me. But as you say, there is something about the ocean that brings stillness to the weary brain, and gives it a much needed rest. I hope we can get past our current health problems and come see you in Nova Scotia one of these days…
That is how we are, building scenarios as if our worry and anxiety would help things along. They don’t, but instead take up lots of energy that could be used to deal with anything that is and needs to be taken care of. I haven’t mastered this as yet, but working on letting worry go. Happy you could spend time on this beautiful shore and get to a more peaceful place.
I haven’t mastered living with uncertainty either. It seems that as we age we accumulate new sets of worries and anxieties and we have to learn all over again how to let them go and put one foot in front of the other and, as you say, deal constructively with whatever is facing us at the present moment. We have so many blessings in spite of the challenges we face…