Getting off track, it seems.  But perhaps it only just seems.  The water goes around stones, shells, kelp, footprints; but it doesn’t have a destination, a direction, an agenda; it just goes where it goes.  Why, then, do we feel that we get “off track?”  Is there a track?  Or is it all the same track, however it appears to meander, stop and start, reverse, abruptly dart, get entrenched.

I walk and look at the footprints.  I don’t want to walk where no one else has walked since the tide came in, intruding on the smooth stretches of sand, but also I don’t want to walk where others have walked, for those spaces seem disrupted, corrupted somehow.  I love the pristine surfaces but then hate marking them.  Conundrums, contradictions, dilemmas of an aesthetic and philosophical nature.

The kelp pods (are they pods?) crack and pop under my sneakers.  I see a pelican for the first time at “our” beach.  The skitterers move in groups, looking like speeded-up caricatures of themselves.  The sea roars and ebbs — on its eternal track.  I pinch myself; I get to see this.  It is right here again.