#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Chilmark, Brickyard Beach

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

― Lao Tzu

There is wind whipping up the waves into whitecaps. I stand, as I do daily, my ritual, on the Great Sand Bank Overlook and have my first view of morning on Vineyard Sound, where I am headed, down the narrow trail through the scrub to the wooden stairs, to the rock-strewn beach. This morning, I am saying a kind of prayer for peace. Letting go, acceptance. And as I turn to leave, barely, just barely visible in the pale blue mist of sky, is the faint trace of a rainbow over the Sound. A surge of joy for this sighting. And my toe is so good. Not broken and back to its energetic self, ready to take on the rocks. I walk and listen to a podcast. The Upaya Zen podcast on ritual, Edoardo Shoryu Eusepi––how can we make our mistakes artistic? All absorbing. I find pictures I love. I am seeing things. The beach is seeing me. My creativity is surging back. I am excited about my book on the poems from letters, and the day spread out to work on it, undisturbed. And my head is reeling with possibilities for new poems and revisions of old poems. I am in my element. I am feeling whole and well and enthusiastic. We walk a long way on the rocks, Charlie and me, but I don’t swim. The surf is a bit rough and I don’t want to get pummelled into rocks. I have work to do! The whole day, most of it, given to work on my manuscript in the quiet. Frank is here, but he is working, and we are both absorbed. In the late afternoon, I take myself to the beach for a swim. It’s a yellow flag day of “caution” in the waves of Lucy Vincent Beach. This morning I watched the Osprey, as I do every morning, who nests on the brick chimney and flies off over the Sound. She must see me too, human and without wings, but with feet, with all ten toes on the rocks taking her time.