I sit watching the dawn rise over the ocean—always a different ocean—whose molecules perhaps touched my far younger self as I fished with my father. I sit here now, in peace, and contemplate the patterns left in the sand, the rocks in the water, the sound of waves. It takes but an instant to gain a freeing calm, a soothing generous gift from the earth.
I never had this sense of peace as a child. If I calmed down for one minute, a rock would push its way into my consciousness. A rock that needed to be dug up, retrieved, explored for urchins, thrown into the water; a source of chaos that my father eventually had to quell.