Rockaway Beach Retroactive
Monday, August 13th, 2007
wind and wave made beach sculpture at twin rocks. for more pics from rockaway beach click here.
We are off to our rented hideaway on Rockaway Beach, Oregon. I’ve set up some posts to go up automatically while I’m away, including this retroactive post from my stay here last summer while I was on writing retreat with Jen. Reading this helps me to breathe easier. May it bring a peaceful sigh to you as well.
__________________________________________
8.16.06
My body is still warm from the bed, which is so soft and heavy with quilts that it holds me like a cupped hand. I have taken in as much sleep as I can absorb. It is nearly nine and the quiet of a solitary house surrounds me – there’s only just the hum of the refrigerator for company.
Before I came here I had begun to notice the jangling noise of city life: voices on the dark sidewalk after we’d already to bed; the Blue Angels searing past the back porch during three days of practice and a weekend of festival maneuvers; the constant low hum of traffic punctuated by the brakes of a metro bus or the impatient horn blast of a boat waiting for the drawbridge. Normally those sounds are familiar aural landmarks, signs of home and place. But eventually the ear and the psyche need a break.
Here the paleness of the soundscape cleanses the palate. There is only the wind moving the curtains, the occasional yap of a disgruntled dog and, when you cross the dunes, the rhythmic, encompassing sounds of the sea. This is the earth’s heartbeat, our own primordial pulse.
It is in this quiet that I rest and recover, emptying my head of endless grocery lists and household schedules. It is here that new forces rush in with the tide and I awake with full-formed paragraphs on my tongue, words for characters yet to be born, and patience enough to watch them in their coming.
I sit at my work table and move the pieces about. Or I spend hours carefully excising background color from an intricate bunch of vintage blossoms. Or I transfer images again and again until they leave the right mark. The pages of my art journal project stack up in front of me, each one leaving me pleased and intrigued to see what happens next. The outline for my book comes easily out of my fingers – it will be four large seasonal chapters with 2 more to bookend them. I am ready to work in the Fall, when the children are in school and the studio is ready for me to inhabit.
Today there will be blackberry muffins and a walk on the beach and discoveries all unto myself. A cottage day on Rockaway Beach.
Entries
