Beach

I am at Playa Cocoa, a beach south of Lima at a friend´s beach house. It resonates of beach time last year in Ecuador and Colombia. It brings me back to North and South Carolina with my family and watching the intimacy of water and sand. Little cochina shell animals would dig into the sand again and again after each passing wave.

I have a copy of Rebecca Solnit´s book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” on my bed here at the beach house. I underlined a section that I will share here. Solnit writes:

Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ´edge mystery´-the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen, artists get you out into that dark sea.

It is hot summer in Lima right now, and I am nursing a bad sunburn. It looks like someone painted me with a pink paintbrush in a haphazard way. I took a nap this afternoon while the friends I came here with watched the sunset. I woke up when they were returning from the beach.

As I walked out to the beach to meet them, I was struck by a deep sweep of yellow-pink across the sunset that moved from the top of the sky into sand demonstrating the infinite. The fog, the layers of sand and water, and the insistence of the sky moving closer towards created a convergence. I felt an approximation of the infinite, walking into the heavens, walking into everything. Visually, you have no bounds as the earth and water and wind seem to only be composed of one substance. Something about it… hauling me out into that sea as well.