Where The Sky Is Born

There is yet the promise of dawn.  That renewal of light which severs black from blue.  A gift born anew each day, bleeding before the world as rays of irrefutable truth.  A cyclical certainty, a transition between the stupor that is restful night and the fury that is a hungry sea filling with penetrating bands of illumination.  An occurrence which spurs the aggressive impulses of scaly hunters and the restless, unnerved behavior of the hunted.  That event which draws man to the edge of this obscure and murkily-blackened expanse of roiling brine, and for his finned-ambitions, undaunted in having shoaled these shallows of the shore in an otherwise near-blindness, under the ineffectual accompaniment that are countless pinholes of starlight above, it serves as prime opportunity to ambush unsuspecting prey.  A narrow slant of time for the striped of scales to winnow the minnow, to remarkably visualize any palatable profile forms fluttering in unison within the seawater’s inky blackness.  She will tactfully exploit this inherent physiological prowess granted by endowment of Nature, specifically, that of her predatory favor of eyesight dominance brandished against the inferior low-light optic faculties of lesser-fortunate baitfishes as emerging light begins to filter into the roaring tidal conveyor gushing over my feet, rushing landward up sandy-slopes seething in sibilant sounds as if these were the gasping pleas of the sea, objecting the forthcoming change, begging for the sinking moon’s return from the western sky.  For the serenity of nighttime to ensue. 

It’s a yearning cry of breaking waves booming, trickling tides talking, and lapping water lecturing that I faithfully listen to during this dissolution of darkness, where I, in turn, silently stand to hunt among the hunters and the hunted.  A man’s insignificant six-foot profile wielding his armament of concentric ceramic coils epoxied to a tapered shaft of carbon-fiber, whipping and slicing forward through the very air he breathes, enlivened by an inseparable companion of thoughts rebelling to the surrounding placidity, rambling in an internal thunderstorm of immutable chatter, however evanescent to the magnitude of greatness that is everything else surrounding him.  Faint retorts to the sea’s indomitable voice.  Participation, in part, of his witnessed awakening to this water-born world.  For this sea, I fancy, wishes for the soft shining of her nocturnal spotlight to forever shower upon her furrowed surface, skittering in a lustrous diffusion of vanity, for the phases of their ancient friendship to continue in coexistence, for this celestial stage-lighting illuminating the changing acts of her tidal performances to outlast time itself. 

No matter, I imagine, for by planetary providence, she is cordially graced with the longing attribute of seduction, solicited for between the daily-pleading and twice-determined serenades of two wooing suitors, Luna and Soleil, both of whom patiently remain at wait for their next assured orbital encounter.  For their next opportunity to charm her as they slip upwards in slow, parabolic ascension and sojourn skyward from beyond that linear mirage marking the distant depths of unseen truth.  For the following moon and sun rises.

Unlike the slender luminosity of Luna’s subtle surface and her ambivalent, chalky-albedo-colored phases cyclically waxing in magnitude and bashfully waning in retreat, soon will begin the diurnal courtship of Soleil, robust in fervor, storming skyward with flaming intensity, boasting a bathing, colorful rebirth from beyond where the earth and sea brew in stirring froth and foam.  It is where Eos will awaken, dawn, ascending from the faraway depths of Oceanus.  This awe-inspiring outburst of creation, in essence, a devout angler’s greatest catch, a blazing keeper for such a worshipping soul, is merely to stoke wonderment, for it will never be quite close enough to grasp or even boast for one’s own attainment.  She is merely ours to marvel, to feast upon at will, to ogle and undress with hungered eyesight as though her solicitation to the senses were as similar in appeal to the suggestive curves of a calling, hourglass figure never meant to satisfy one’s desire of want or belonging, of sweeping with a salacious touch.  However close, yet forever a tease too afar. 

Praised rather, is the extraordinary, eye-catching spectacle of her breath-stalling form, an unabating allure calling one closer towards this all-consuming nature of Nature, a reality tugging at one’s direction to be here, on sand, where the lapping surf and bath of briny air dares without permission to infuse within the very pores of one’s skin, where a life, one as seemingly inseparable to continuance and impulsive in its embrace as wind beneath an ensemble of sharp-sounding shrills squawking from breasting seabirds, swooping and hovering upon the mass of cushioned air pressed against the scalloped waterline, insists in reinforcing to remind me of my own saltwater-stricken motive and piscatorial-prescribed passions.  A fluttering beat of life trying the limit of its own aerial boundaries.  A man astir, maneuvering to define his own.  Ascensions to freedom by individual factors of choice, dare, and provocation.  This act of acceptance being like an unquestionable truth, a fully-accepted, fundamental force of Nature defining a fibrous fragment of one’s existence.  A fleeting snapshot surfacing from the latent depths of reality much like the enigmatic, striped-fish you so patiently pursue, the once beached, finned-prize you admire briefly before release, when only by perfect timing as she is momentarily mirroring and glistening of the rising sun’s low-angle bath of orange and sanguine hues, those first shed upon the world, does it become understood that such imbued observations are only yours to relish in sensation and visual experience before disappearing into the vastness of sweeping transition and faded recognition.  The elastic sky of color, the fluid saline home, the furtive fish.  All become an acclaimed acknowledgement of opportunity for another time, another day of existence, yet unborn.     

And so exposed through the widened-pupil aperture of gazing, seaward-directed eyes, and developed in the darkroom of the mind, hang this series of drying prints capturing for the personal experience what is a worldly awakening that only may be observed during these intimate, parting minutes of time, as damp and heavy, salty inhalations invade one’s being to its deepest reaches, weighing to dissolve what is flesh from splashing foam, as boundaries successively come revealed through the shedding layers and gradations of darkness, as the disrobing of homogeneity ensues, that visual oneness as perceived throughout an otherwise monochromatic vastness of a seascape devoid of color.  The wrapping cloak of night slowly unbuttons and undresses her nighttime gown to make plain a natural bareness, the nakedness that are the curves and lines defining her distinct shapes and form.  The lineaments of recognition.  Familiar tones and hues shared in her gathering embrace.  The blurring bewilderment between shadowy sand and sea becomes obliterated with this increasing acuteness of a sky growing in refined focus with deep gradients of blue towering towards the heavens from the horizontal division of these distant waters.  As if the sea herself offers to share her own complexion, diffusing upwards in a casting reflection of rising reform.  A gaining charge urging the eclipse of night to finally resign.

An incessant beeping sounds, startling my mind, interrupting a silent state of blanketed blankness.  I mute the digital invader of quietude.  The time has arrived. Groaning through a twisting, body-arching and stretching exhalation of rigidity, I remind myself that I wanted this moment more than sleep itself.  The staggering temptation to resist springing upwards cowardly coaxes, those devilish seconds as daunting and tiresome as dragging chains of iron shackled to your drowsy spirit of motivation and seeming to last minutes instead.  I cannot allow this to sway my desired ambitions.  Don’t mess this up.  The weekend.  Too short in duration and precious in possibility.  A somniferous skirmish I will win so as not to regretfully cross the divide of slumber returning me to sound sleep, and fishless dreams. 

Yet supine, but awake. I squint, breaking-open cemented-closed eyelids to hazily peer through the bedroom window’s drawn-shut sheer drapes.  Nighttime.  There is a single hue coloring my view, that of the artificial, yellow-colored light of a neighbor’s outdoor flood-lamp, diffusing valiantly as the only challenger to a domineering, obsidian-colored darkness.  In time, its tungsten filaments will cease glowing, perhaps at the electronic command of a programmed timer or photoelectric sensor, retiring in brilliance, an unfaltering feather-weight victory in its own right over the preeminence of night, having become relieved of sentry as it is outshined by the creeping omnipresence of a fiery orb ascending slowly from the fathoms of the east, torches of unyielding brilliance now passed of hands, the latter stripping reins of control from the slipping grip of night, bleeding the dim shades of an indigo blue skyward from under the faraway horizon as if they were the blended swirls of watercolor paint becoming drawn upwards into the bristles of Nature’s brush daubing at the surface of the sea for the morning’s first stroke upon this new canvas.  For now, this prismatic exhibition is yet unpainted, indiscernible in greatness.

I am in a physical race against the ticking advancement of time.  Of sneaking within the opportunities of open window which she so obstinately presents before shutting closed and locking from outside entry.  Time and tide wait for no man, remember.  The ocean is rising.  The sun soon too.  Both are unstoppable in motion, posing specific slivers of promise each.  If I am so fortunate as to wade amongst the presence of stalking fish, at best, I can only expect such a gift of linesided-luck to occur when I act with calculated timing, so as to allow an opportune collision-course between environmentally-attentive lateral lines and acoustically-enticing retrieves of swimming plugs to impart what is a striking encounter of fate.  Even at ungodly hours of the morning on a desolate stretch of beach, under a fading ceiling of stars, timing remains to be everything.  It is the only thing as reliable and necessary for a successful run-in with fish as the submerged, shifting grains of sand scoured from under the heels of my planted feet before the rhythmic flooding of broken waves and backwash rushing towards the surf, grabbing at my ankles to seduce and solicit my attention seaward, will have in letting me know that I am boldly alive and in no better place possible.  I will have witnessed another day bloom in creation over the Atlantic.

My bare feet, curling as they stretch awake after hours of weightless surrender, swing from the warm, layered depths of cotton and flannel sheets, dangling from the mattress edge to make contact with the plush sponginess of a cool, awaiting carpet.  Opposites touch.  My mind briefly focuses upon the chilly sensation.  An environmental stimulus.  Nothing more, then it’s gone.  It’s something that comes with waking early in late-November.  A primer, insignificant in scope, as compared to how the elements will aspire to challenge today.  I stand upright in this quiet darkness, in a room seemingly unfamiliar to me at this time of the morning, slowly shaking fuzzy thoughts tempting me to take the easy way out, returning to the carefree comfort of a toasty bed, empty to my backside, bleeding away warmth from the wrinkled impression of my contour, as I shrug-off a stiff sluggishness.  I have awoken with anticipatory determination.  Excitement for what lies ahead.  To make first-contact with sinking sand under the boots of my stomping waders, beginning the meandering march made foot by foot, closer towards the moment when my first cast will become rocketed seaward, will be worth all my effort and every second of otherwise lost sleep. 

Just as the familiar daytime colors of reality are suppressed, drenched in shrouds of darkness which only impart subtle recognitions of form, shapes, or outlines of my surrounding environ, so too are absent even the slightest sounds of this world to the keenest of listening, those which otherwise enliven our awareness with sonic signatures of what is.  I consider this impermanent semblance of deafness an acceptance of peace.  An aural retreat from the cacophony of everyday existence.  Appreciations of undervalued understanding for the price associated with calming silence.  No matter, for with increasing light, will come sprouting sound.  Testaments to change and proclamations of a world in motion.  Occurrences of life unfolding. 

For one, I anticipate listening to the distant, resonant sounds of tightly-curling waves crashing ashore, “good-morning” greetings from the sea, saltwater salutations tumbling ashore as their fluid, circular motions pound the beach, producing a muffled, thunderous sound in the bass-range.  I think of it as Nature’s barefooted heel striking firmly and thudding repeatedly against her sandy floor, proclaiming a booming presence during the changing tidal state.  To walk closer to the site of her stomping footsteps, to feel these split-second, shuddering vibrations carrying throughout the surrounding air, absorbed into your body, is attestation to having tread your wader-clad feet upon this heartbeat of the surf.  You have listened through the tried-and-true stethoscope of your soul to the healthy, beating pulse of an ocean alive with an incessant intensity of unmatched strength and vigor.  She is a temptress to the thirst of your devotion.

I pick-up an ignition key that I placed overnight atop an end-table set beside my apartment’s front door.  The key’s rounded-smooth edges, worn by the treatment of time, do nothing more than wait to become inserted for the ten-thousandth time into the lock of my car.  It’s a perfectly-mated, sawed-tooth gateway offering liberation of sorts, allowing me to begin a physical journey elsewhere.  My mind, in a newfound frame-of-reference, jumpstarted in motion, will unlock the rest.  Dormant in the elements all night, my escape is nothing more than an inert ice-box on wheels. 

A buffeting of arctic wind driving from the north-west shears across my ears, producing a ruffling sound when the angle is made just right to the cold, fluttering breeze.  I yawn, scrunching my face.  My vision briefly falls bleary, momentarily blurred under the refractive distortion of tears.  Both eyes glaze-over, watering at first-contact to the abnormally-cold November air stinging the dry, taut skin of my face.  A Jergens model’s nightmare.  Nature has unapologetically piqued my attention.  A divide of comfort crossed.  Forgotten are the sensations of soft cotton comforts, the stillness of rest, and the smothering warmth of bed.  I am in a different state-of-mind now, excited to have immersed myself yet again, challenged as a vying contender to these elements, to my own willful stamina, at the tail-end of an ebbing season, tested in a trying bath of frigid air.  All to find fish. 

Any sane person may question my motive.  Is not the beach for summertime enjoyment, under the baking heat of the sun?  I would not necessarily disagree, but I am also a fisherman.  Fishermen see the sea differently.  It is on the sand and jetty tops where my roots find nurturing ground and scaly sustenance.  That is my place in the sun.  Is this really the same beach I am venturing to step foot upon at it was in August, anyway?  Seasons have brought about change.  She more resembles a barren tundra now, combed-over by a frigid wind sending a tan-colored haze of scattering sand granules airborne about her surface.  A sinuous, miniature sandstorm at ankle-level.  Caustic in reception, but graceful in its own effect.  A never-ending rearrangement and reshaping.  Besides, only our perceptions define what becomes of reality.  The way I see it, there are fish gliding within the very depths where I swam months prior, stalking prey from beneath where my tanned, bobbing face was influenced skyward to those sedative rays beaming from the sun shining high above, legs gently kicking and arms sweeping, where this man’s unsinkable spirit was held buoyant by an ablutionary liquid-peace, his body floating idly in refreshing, seventy-eight-degree water beside his smoking-hot better-half precariously wrapped with stretchy and stringy, suggestive threads of Lycra knotted at her hips and tied mid-back.  Memories, now, being the only evidence salvaged after this dissolution of time.  Remnants of activity much like the dried residue of salt blanketing one’s skin, and thickening the volume of hair atop their head, an aftereffect of emerging from this ocean.  This fine, dusty coating, this accumulated layer of experience encased tautly over your body’s exterior, an artifact of action enriching your being, will only endure for as long as you can preserve its accompaniment to complexion, texture to reality, importance to memory.  

On this morning, all barriers characterizing the many constricting constraints limiting the latitude of my personal choice, those which entreat ascension to routine weekday conformities, are unabashedly breached.  Dissolved like salt in water.  Finally cleansed of.  Made invisible.  With the evaporation of the weekend, I will come to see their routine reappearance.  For now, today, I am free of the damned demands associated with earning a paycheck in this go-go-don’t-stop-for-a-single-second society of ours.  One would be hard-pressed for arguing a logical reason to follow them anyway at these burgeoning, single-digit hours of the clock-face during the final weeks to the calendar year.  I think of this liberty as a weekend rite-of-passage towards renewal, as the real-self reemerges from what may be thought of as a fisherman’s false-reality, one I bear to live as “the workweek.”  There will be no pressed white-collars and neatly-fashioned Windsor knots at this morning’s meeting.  Uni and Albrights only.  And I proudly wear stubble instead.  It’s a natural, gruff, complimentary appearance I look forward to wearing all-week-long. The growth of change.  A detachment from my morning norm.  The parting of an otherwise daily ritual.  At some point, I’ll find myself brushing the stout stubble of hairs lining my jawline and cheek into an open palm in slow, up and down strokes, impulsive inclinations coupling those otherwise languid occasions fraught with flat-lined thought and unblinking, thousand-yard stares out to sea, a habitual course of comfort nursing paring moments of repose, all of which seem to be second-nature whenever sporting this protruding signature of manhood from the rim of my face.  A homage to habit.  Similar in condition to the coarse and tangled disposition of the surf during an easterly blow or when fouled by weather.  Unshaven, just as well.  An embraced state, whether masculine at heart or gnarly in temperament, both are something I like to tangibly feel to my touch to know they are real.

 

The cushioned, rubber weather-strip seal insulating the frame of the drivers-side door resists my pulling tug of separation, stubbornly tearing apart from a frosted adhesion set overnight.  The ambient temperature had reached dew point.  Ice formed.  The air itself laminated these two mating, otherwise protective layers from the extremes brought about by weather, forcing them temporarily bonded to one another.  I can relate.  There are mornings where I too, am just as difficult to peel from under the sheets welded against my warmed skin, lying embedded into a sunken mattress like a fossil frozen in a slab of stone.     

I’m here, again, motionless, sitting in the driver’s seat of my sedan, exchanging short-lived puffs of condensed breath into the crisp-air of the cabin.  The engine turns over, idling high.  I wait.  For both the car, and myself, to warm.  I look ahead, out the windshield, but not at a roadway passing by.  I’m looking miles ahead in my mind, drawing my crossed arms tight unto my torso, as a quick muscle spasm shivers across my chest.  Even at an hour like this, in a comatose world devoid of even the slightest hint of liveliness, a thousand random thoughts, alive and aloft in their indulgence, find a reason to parade inside my head.  Sometimes I feel as though they themselves, swarming about my face like a dense offense of mosquitos, buzzing, distracting, annoying, threatening, weaving and tangling amongst one another, the baggage of bête noire side-tracking tranquility and sound well-being, nagging for the continued sustenance of a host, despotically commanding valuable time or increased effort and attention, are those that attempt to detract me from what is surfcasting’s overall simplicity, awaiting unhooked from reality.  Where I may swim freely as the fish I seek.  Think as clearly as the fresh air I breathe. 

Still waters may run deep, but actions speak louder than words.  The crunching carbide-tip studs of my Korkers grinding atop mossy granite jetty-tops will serve as stepping testaments of conspiracy against an affiliation to life lived on land.  And with that, I will allow only one string to remain attached to myself, most willingly and dearly, of course.  Perched atop an awaiting, interlocking passageway of boulders leading to depths of the unknown, I will use every caution to stay bound to the frailty of my retrieved mainline, my indispensable, millimeter-thin helpmate, faithfully drawn from the sea with each repeated cast, a braided ambassador of my soul’s intentions, neatly repacking onto my reel’s spool, layering tightly with a weaved and winded order, where I will remain at the ready, for more.  It’s my essential lifeline to sanity, to a self-preservation of sorts.  But these interloping thoughts, in order to survive day after day, in order to materialize even, must live-off the favor of the present, greedily seeking to suck from the warm blood of memories ago in order to survive.  Parasitical judgments to those remnants of the past, resplendent or not.  A past, if relived once, was relived one-thousand times already.  Being here, I simply want to get away.  I want to use my best judgment, find a favorable spot, somewhere, and cast away.  If fish are there, I will know.  If fish are not there, I will still harbor hope.

Sometimes, to strenuously over-think is to simply over-work.  Why must I project so deeply into the matter, analyze, wonder, fantasize?  Why can’t I save that energy for work, for the endless challenges that are life, for what really matters?  Release.  It is all waiting for me anyway upon my return home.  Just where I left it.  Or does sitting in my car, in the desolate darkness before dawn, matter just as much?  Isn’t this simply a pastime in which I engage, an escapism, a hobby which doesn’t translate direct value to life?  Leisure, satisfaction, and refinement of skills, sure, but it’s more of a personal, visceral challenge to the physical embodiment of oneself protesting to the oft harsh and unforgiving elements of Nature, those that incessantly wear away at one’s foreign composure of order pitted against a merciless saltwater environment, that unnatural neatness accosted by a natural entropy, but there must be more.  I can feel it.  Something deeper, harping at the very fibers of one’s essence, plucking at the strings of one’s soul, the music thus sounding being the magnum opus, the very notes, the unique signature of oneself imploring and provoking at the listening ears of the sea, a casting composition of sound proclaiming what it means to be a human placed wildly amongst the natural world, if only for hours at a time.  A perennial pupil learning what really is. 

Relief is within casting range.  Very shortly from now, I will become the wayfaring surfcaster who embarks eastward, treading atop an oceanfront altar sedated under this blackened veil of nighttime, forging forward prior to any crimson coloring of the heavens, before Eos’s rosy-fingered awakening paints the familiar hues that are a new day erupting from the sea’s horizon.  Physically, I’ll be in search of a suitable spot to stand upon cold, wet sand squiggling throughout a beach’s unsettled wash-zone, where my bootprints are the shifting evidence of a shore-bound, clandestine-calling leading me to the smoothened, striated sand of the surf’s slope, where these tracks of mine will eventually terminate, becoming dissolved from sight.  That will be where I am finally freed from objection, where I sink into an unspoken sanctum, spanning a turbid event horizon near my boots, defined at the brink of a liquid existence, one rising and falling, splashing and flowing.  I will feel the firm base of sand shift slightly under the weight of my bearing, radiating rings of water from its saturated mass, offering solace for my bruised sense of devotion while away in absence, a caressing invitation for my mind to ebb with the towing tide, to float purposefully adrift on the coddling currents of reckless abandon.  You would not understand what I wish to express unless your outstretched wings too, have spread wide and far, holding you aloft, suspended within the thermal updrafts of freedom, the cushioning billows of air allowing you, in an abandoned mind-set, to effortlessly glide with ease to new-found, soaring heights, all-the-while possessing complete control of choice, for when you deem it necessary to shed this inspiring, invigorating energy, and remit spiritual altitude from these outstretched wings of ascension, choosing when to retract these fluttering feathers to the very air you breath and descend closer to reality in a spiraling finality of finesse, holding in deeply the inhaled hopes of something nearly imperceptible, but sacrosanct and metaphysical to one’s self, before finally returning with the softest of landing, rebounding to the world we all know and awake to each morning, in this moment, grasping tightly to a radiantly consummate feeling of rebirth, a rejuvenation of purpose, as if the time spent alone brought you closer to an existential enlightenment, a moment of environmental clarity whispering panoramic murmurs, elucidations for your longing, listening ears to gorge upon. 

The splashing, rushing, and babbling of mightily moving water against rock and gravel, the hissing seethes over the surf’s sand, the hollow booming of curling waves breaking upon the shoreline’s backbone, these autonomous actions of Nature, will always occur, regardless of occasion.  Unending repetitions with no beginning and no conclusion.  But for the seeking surfcaster, there exist a limited, precious minutes of time where one will have the best standing-room beset before the aquatic amphitheatre of the sea, with the most coveted view of this stage’s closed curtains, soon to draw open for awaiting eyes, to enrapture the senses with an unrivaled performance of color and sensation to spirit.  If you must find me, simply follow my meandering, smeared sand-impressed signature of concave, crimpled boot-prints left abandoned in my slipstream, evidence of my wandering course which abruptly terminates from sight along the leading-edge of the sloped beach’s face, where the farthest stretches of the foamy white water’s rhythmically-reaching fingers fan, washing-away into bubbling sand to mask the perambulatory presence of those like myself who wake and come to cast. 

These are my guiding directions.  Waypoints I’ve set on my map of discovery.  The pillars of support to my faith.  The sextant I hold to the nighttime sky in order to align myself and learn bearing.  This is why I have arisen from sleep in the middle of the night, for the moving finger of this fisherman writes.  I am a disciple to the playhouse of the sea, to a sight yet unseen, to this, the very moment of intrigue at which I tread before, as I stand waist-deep in the ink-blackened water of the surf amid nighttime’s blinding fog of darkness, with nothing more than miles of empty space set between the advancing seconds of dawn and my seaward peering eyes, waiting for when those windows to the soul, fixated upon a horizon awakening in contrast, hungry to be fed light, are finally rewarded with a nurturing feast of color.  For the debut of encompassing detail to furnish this silhouette of encouragement.  For when the chromatic spectrum spanning from complete blackness above my head transforms vertically, retreating, as subtle gradients of midnight, cobalt, and navy blues, intensifying in opposition, bleed skyward, all of which become accentuated by vivid, airbrushed sprays of color painting the undersides of low-hanging cumulous clouds.  For the breathtaking seconds of crimson change to compete before clearly culminating in a climaxing crescendo, screaming, as emergent, brilliantly emanating slivers of striated scarlet streaks tear-open the sky, burning like a bed of glowing coals smoldering in the hearth of a forge or the ashen, flaky growth rings and fluttering embers of a split log wavering within the heart of a wood-fire, arresting one’s attention of all else near. This forthcoming medley, this waterborne-wildfire enveloping the eastern vista in a sea of flames, a concordance of yellow, orange, magenta, copper, and red, fueled by the precious, billowing minutes of daybreak, is surely the apex of the ephemera.  The welcoming bath of dawn, consummating in sunrise, will be a special moment to savor, to taste upon my salty spirit.  I will be amongst those who have witnessed this unfolding metamorphosis evolve from the blackness of night to the very last second when the burning gaseous orb, refracting orange celestial light about its wiggling periphery, ascends above the faraway horizon, slowly breaking tangential contact of its lower arc from the sea like that of a drooping drop of morning dew, stretching from the tip of a leaf before slipping away, breaking free.  The sun, at last, will have been released to orbit the sky yet again.  A day rebirthed anew. 

I will come to visualize, with an absolute certainty reinforcing my seasoned convictions, that there is no place better I could be right now, for not everyone is remotely fortunate enough to journey where the sky is born.

The blurring bewilderment between shadowy sand and sea becomes obliterated with the increasing acuteness of a sky growing in refined focus with deep gradients of blue towering towards the heavens from the horizontal division of these distant waters.  As if the sea herself offers to share her own complexion, diffusing upwards in a casting reflection of rising reform.  A gaining charge urging the eclipse of night to finally resign.

A fleeting snapshot surfacing from the latent depths of reality much like the enigmatic, striped-fish you so patiently pursue, the once beached, finned-prize you admire briefly before release, when only by perfect timing as she is momentarily mirroring and glistening of the rising sun’s low-angle bath of orange and sanguine hues, those first shed upon the world, does it become understood that such imbued observations are only yours to relish in sensation and visual experience before disappearing into the vastness of sweeping transition and faded recognition.

~

“Before the passing sky, in long hours of contemplation of its magnificent and ever-changing beauty, I am seized by an incomparable emotion.  Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul.  To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! ... that is what I call prayer.”  -  Claude Debussy