The beach in winter...

I miss the ocean. It's the one thing about living in the Midwest that I regret the most, because I used to take regular trips to a small town on the East cost named Duxbury to just sit and watch the ocean, and I can't readily do that any more. I have to settle for a picture of that beach that sits above my desk.

I remember the last time I was at the ocean in wintertime. Joe was with me. We went to Westport a small, now-exclusive community on the southern Massachusetts coast where I had lived as a baby with my parents shortly after I was born. Westport was chilly that day. The wind whipped you with darting pellets of mist. It was gray. You could smell the decaying seaweed at the shore line, and the sand was so soft and deep that it nearly clawed your shoes from your feet. We walked for quite a long way along that desolate beach, just Joe and I talking about the pleasure of being there...together.

One of the wonderful parts of the beach in wintertime is that it is so deserted. Where in August there are beach blankets coating the sand, in January you are free to walk the gravel near the water or the fine sand in the dunes. There's no one there to ward you off the dunes or stop you from huddling against one to break the wind.

Such is a great time to think. I call it active meditation as you wander along a beach in solitude. You're free to allow anything to come to mind, of course, but it is best experienced as true meditation whereby you acknowledge the wind, sea spray and cold and feel the deepness with which they touch you. Meditation is - for me - more about living in the moment and feeling and acknowledging the world around me than it is trying to blank out my mind and think of nothingness. All too often I am under pressure to deal with the world as it is and my mind is frequently filled with the thoughts and worries that impinge on it. There are few times like those by the sea when I can feel the pressure of the present moment on me and revel in it.

I miss times like that. For some reason, standing by a lake that barely moves in summer and or one encased in ice in winter is a more shallow experience for me that the powerful surge of the tides and the seemingly endless horizon of the ocean. Maybe some day I can get back to that. For now, I live in the memory of it and the highly-prized feeling of warmth and love that I get when I think back to that day in Westport with Joe.

All the best, Roger W.