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 and stone formations along the west 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 even 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 place 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. To make matters more complicated, two people can perceive the same event, in the words of someone I know, completely differently. But the future is much more predictable for its absolute mystery. When we think ahead no one knows 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. 

For all of the eternalness of the ocean and the trees, at least from our perspective as they certainly precede and last longer than us, it is our own mortality which makes even the oceans seem to be here but for a moment. Funny how some things in life you once thought of as permanent turned out to be a phase, proverbial ships in the night. At the same time there is a certain comfort in those transient moments which keep returning and again returning which make life tolerable. Love, at its very core is as eternal as the elements, yet can appear fleeting. It isn’t. It is always there, just below the surface, still growing from what was once a sapling, a chance encounter. Still pulling itself together from some place deep inside and far away, rushing across the surface of our years to our lives now. And like the deciduous redwoods which go dormant each year despite their longevity, often who we really are remains quietly below the surface waiting, just waiting.

But that’s vague and ethereal, which goes over my head more than often than not.

So listen: I only know 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 out west 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.

And that’s all I know.

I was that rarest version of me: me one hundred percent myself without the need to “present” myself anything other than who I truly am; something which I no longer thought was possible. 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. I have learned that lesson many times along the shores of the Atlantic and rivers around the world, but this time I had all the ingredients to understand. Time is not so persistent that it doesn’t allow us to learn more about ourselves at this point in life. One can be as old as the oceans yet as young as its waves.

That sounds really good but I’m not sure it means anything.

The truth is 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. There are certainly battles along the way. The Redwoods have fought fires, floods, typhons, earthquakes, and more, and for our part, there are personal battles which often make us feel like no wave can wash away our pain. But, of course, we survive and move on, a little closer to who we will eventually become if we just allow ourselves to, with apologies to Dan Fogelberg, “Be who we must.”

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.