Flying Together

Gooseberry Island, Westport, Massachusetts 

Walking along a windy, rough coast does not spark hopes of seeing anybody.
  But they are here.
   A sizable group of sandpipers almost invisible among rocky pebbles,
    yet illustrious as a singular energy stream when taking off.

  Such a delight to see them in the air as a unit  
   and it amazes me
    how they leave their individuality and plunge into synchrony with others. How is it possible?

  In his book The Outermost House, Henry Beston asks himself a similar question:
     ... is there some psychic relation between these creatures?
     Does some current flow through them and between them as they fly?

  I guess, we may never know...

    ... For the animal shall not be measured by man.
    In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete,
    gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
 
    living by voices we shall never hear... 

It is All About Waves

Nauset Light Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Somewhere in ocean, perhaps a thousand miles and more from this beach,
the pulse beat of earth liberates a vibration, an ocean wave...

Once created, the wave...begins its journey through the sea...

It approaches the continent...courses ashore, breaks, dissolves, is gone.
The innermost waters it last inhabited
            flow back in marbly foam to become a body to another beat...

So it goes night and day,
and will go till the secret heart of earth strikes out its last slow beat,
and the last wave dissolves upon the last forsaken shore...

HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House

The Revelation of a Moment

 Rocky Woods, Medfield, Massachusetts

So near is man to the creative pageant, so
much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment,
that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment,
a solitary note heard in a symphony
thundering through debatable existence of time.

HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House

Defined by the Sea

Marconi Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Age by age, the sea here gives battle to the land;
age by age, the earth struggles for her own,
calling to her defence her energies and her creations,
bidding her plants steal down upon the beach, and
holding the frontier sands in a net of grass and roots which the storms wash free.

The great rhythms of nature... have here their spacious and primeval liberty;

HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House

Early Light

Nauset Light Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

When all has been said,
the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live,
and not to have joy in it and awe of it,
not to share in it,
is to close a dull door on nature's sustaining and poetic spirit.

HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House