We walked around a tree so wide I could have parked a few cars in the trunk. The sapling of this Redwood broke ground no later than about the time of St Francis of Assisi and as early as the time of Christ. So when I was born, the tree had already been on the planet between eight and twenty centuries.

It isn’t the biggest one out there.

The waves which carve the Devil’s Cauldron and other such monoliths along the coast have carved the rock for millions of years, crashing in the same current we watched from the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. Understand, I’ve lived along the ocean my entire life and during my teens spent as much time in the water as I did out, but the Pacific has a different and very separate vibe, like it pulls itself out of the Mariana Trench every morning and explodes across the world toward the California and Oregon coast. It moves with seeming purpose and focus. This Pacific World is permanent, the infinite motion, the endless ebb and flow.

Along the reach in front of the Sunset Beach Hotel groups of people come and rake designs in the sand; circles and flowers which at first appear from a hundred feet above as individual and unrelated efforts, but they eventually join as volunteers meticulously shape the paths and designs, and in the center of each they place shells or other marine findings. When it is finished (or before they are through) people line up or jump the line to follow the paths around like a sand labyrinth, seldom cheating, seldom hurrying others along. It is meditative to follow a brand new path no one has walked, and then to watch the incoming tide slowly swallow the western edges of the design, reaching up further each time, waves like hands reaching up and erasing the sand, smoothing it out, establishing for us all the impermanence of life, ironically through the rhythmic tides which are as old and permanent as the earth itself. 

Then we looked for sand dollars and sea glass. 

I have far less years ahead than behind. My last book is a memoir of an event I can remember like it happened this morning, yet it takes places forty-five years ago. Life in the past seems so swift because we can recall a moment instantly and transport ourselves to that event with a blink. It leaves the illusion that time went by fast, which of course it did not. When we think ahead we don’t know what will happen, how we will get there or even if we will get there, so we think ahead in slow motion, watching the mysterious and unrevealing turns in our lives. Ten years from now seems like a long ways away; ten years ago happened just before lunch. We are permanent; we are passing through.

The world is a mess. The events happening now have curbed my ability to travel to so many places, and the ripple effect is depressing by degree. But out on the Oregon Coast, those places of turmoil and the tyrants who cause the chaos no longer existed, and even the East Coast version of me seemed to slip away, leaving only the part of my life that understands the tough balancing act between the permanence of the ocean and the brevity of the lines we make in the sand. 

But for this: I am alive now, awake and aware of my mortality and my chance, still now, to live life on my terms, at my pace. It took very little to make me feel completely aware and in the moment; I had no cravings for things or special meals or information–especially not for information. I learned again, for I have learned this lesson as many times as I have watched the waves pound the sand, to be present, aware of who I am, who I am with, without worry of words or silence or formality of casual moments. Absolute comfort without even understanding the transition.

I was me one hundred percent myself, which I no longer thought was possible. Seventy percent of each of us is water. Seventy percent of the world is covered in water. I was born in the sign of water (don’t…). But allowing myself to relax and let go made me aware of how those times which squeeze our soul are as transient as the wind, and all that was left was who I really am.  

Everything it seems is as old as the redwoods, including me, and everything as temporal as the paths we make in the sand as the tide is rising, including, of course, us all. 

Grandma Moses was right: Life is what you make of it. Always has been; always will be.

Bob Marley was right as well: Everything’s gonna be alright.