What Waves Do

Pushed and pulled by forces from sun and moon

waves rolls across entire oceans

until they strike some thing.

Some waves pound upon a sandy shore and climb

until they can climb no more

and so they recede.

In great rounded loops they fall back into the sea.

Yet somehow their rounding retreats

striate into crisscross lines in sand.

Some waves slap on roots, or reefs and rocks;

swiftly they swing and swerve in uncertainty

recasting light as swirly pearls.

Some waves churn up discrepant truth by summoning stuff

into yon distant slick of dubious flotsam fluff:

Is it mirage or mire or  mystery oil or what?

. . . as seen plainly from a plane ! a glut of what?

Glass Chimera

The Better Waves

Everywhere everywhere we have waves bouncing around.

The sun sends them to us, across 93 millions of space. They hit our little planet; they reverberate in all kinds of ways. Some of them we capture and channel into energetic uses.

Others we do not capture at all. They just ripple around placidly in places unseen.

Out in the wild, in some natural place where the planetary stream gently trickles through unspoiled environs, we may notice waves just rippling along being their leisurely selves.

If we peer closely at them, we may notice the universal vibration passing through our brief moment in time and space.

In other locations, where humans have captured the waves and trained them into commercial or utilitarian applications, they just degenerate into more of the blahblah interference that we encounter every day in our electronified existence. Like this pic taken at a gas station, where apparently the petrol pushers have determined that we cannot be without electronic stimulation for any amount of time—even the 2 or 3 minutes it takes to fill an itinerant gasoline tank.

Although it is strangely reassuring to see a human face there in the mix, especially a pretty one. . .

 

Glass Chimera

Sand Beach

(With appreciation of Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach)

 

The Ocean is strong  today.

The waves roll in; the sun is bright

upon the Pacific. In this island surf the light

sparkles and tumbles; the rocky shores stand,

steadfast and vast, under a friendly sun.

Let’s do the beach; this afternoon’s energy is vigorous.

But hey! from this long splash of spray,

where sea meets the sun-kiss’d land—

Listen! we hear the pounding roar

of sand grains which the waves draw back, and fling,

forever, upon this high strand.

Beginning and ceasing, and then beginning again,

with a forceful rhythm it perseveres, to roll

The eternal resonance of wonder in.

 

Dear Matthew, back in the day,

heard this on the North Sea, and it brought

into his mind the ponderous ebb and flow

of our melancholy brood; we

hear it still the same; yet with that lamenting we discern

a reverberating of relentless purpose

in this pounding Pacific shore.

 

Oh sea of faith!

Persistent and unrelenting, all ‘round our earth’s shore—

you flap forever like folds of a bright banner unfurled.

Although I also feel

that ancient melancholy, the long, withdrawing roar,

retreating, in the breath

of the evening wind, laden with our roiling refugees

and the uncared-for masses of the world.

 

Oh, people, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

to boil before us like a pot of strife—

so disjointed, so distraught, so stubbornly the same,

really has somewhere some joy, love, and even flashes of benevolence,

some certainty— here and there a little peace— even some easing of the pain,

while we here on this fragg’ed globe

get swept with fake news and tweeting dweebs who incite us,

as ill-informed combatants clash with their devices.

 

Glass Chimera

The Interface of Light and Matter in Costa Rica

In my freshman philosophy class, Dr. Henderson used the word "anthropomorphic" to describe Man's tendency to form a notion of God into his own human image. That is to say, we make God out to be human, or like a human, because that's all we know.
After 44 years later of pondering this and living the wonderful life God hath provided, I prefer the Torahic approach to conceiving what God is like. Torah, or Genesis, says God made Man in His own image. God was expressing himself when created all things, including humans. If we see human characteristics in his handiwork, it's because God intended for us to see that he was expressing himself through creation, just like we do.
God is an artist, like me.
Those artistic tendencies that he developed within me are what enable me to appreciate the Artist that He is.
Here is an example:

Nice work, n'est ce pa? I like this better than, say, Mondrian, Pollock or Warhol. And it's almost as interesting as Wyeth or Monet.
Here's another, with a little more background, like DaVinci adding background to Mona's portrait:

Sometimes, God takes his brush and turns it downward with a little perpendicular slash, like Van Gogh:

Other times, God uses his electromagnetic energy to separate Light from Dark, like he did in the Beginning:

Every now and then, we see a microcosmic image that resembles a larger microcosm. Here's one that reminds me of an airplane view I got once, over Utah, or maybe it was Nevada.

Another good thing about the Original Artist: He like to use his critters to help make the work interesting. Here's one where the sand critters do their thing:

Pretty interesting, n'est ce pas? That's enough for today's gallery. Time for dinner. I think Pat's throwing a salad together with celery or broccoli, maybe parsley. (wacplnts)

But listen! What Victorious hailing rings from yon beach bar? It is celebration! Costa Rica has defeated Greece in World Cup soccer! That "V" in picture above takes on a new meaning here in Costa Rica. Viva Costa Rica!

Glass Chimera

A Strand of Providence

One of my favorite things to do in this life is visiting the sea strand. The beach. While growing up in Louisiana and Mississippi, our family had many excursions with fond memories to the Gulf Coast at Mississippi and Florida.

After graduation from LSU in 1973, I took a job in Florida and moved to St. Petersburg.

In my year-and-a half stay there I spent many days and hours at the beach, becoming intimately familiar with that setting--that expression of nature's wonders.

Through many hours of studying the interaction of tidal water and surf-sand, I noticed a few things about the cycles of our life existence.

In the forty years since that Florida time I have visited many beaches throughout the world, from Calabash to Rockaway to Dover and Calais, from Hawaii to China, from Tel Aviv to Cayman to California and Carolina. I love experiencing beaches. Doesn't everyone?

Today is our first morning in Costa Rica. We got into Liberia airport, then drove to Tamarindo, on the Pacific. So of course I got up early and walked a few hundred yards to the beach. Perfect beach: wide, flat, smooth with very pacific waves, arranged in a classic half-moon arc with nearby low mountains in the distance. Clear morning, not yet hot.

As has happened on may beaches before, the first thing I notice while approaching the surf is that cycle of dark and light bands of sand at the water's edge, where the waves roll in gently and do their artwork in the sand. My favorite beach characteristic to notice and contemplate.

I consider these waves, their perpetual rearrangement of the sand grains, and it takes me back to the time when I first began to notice this universal cycle, back in St. Petersburg. A meditation on nature to revisit. I think I'll linger for awhile.

Being a civilized animal, I prefer to sit in a chair while thinking. So I go back to the condo and get one.

A few minutes later I am sitting in the chair at the water's edge, considering the ocean, the sand, the wave motions and their visual record of rearranging dark and light bands of sand, the cycles they indicate or perhaps represent, the universe, God, and ignorant armies clashing by night and Dover Beach and all that stuff.

I think the first level of such thought/meditation is analytical. Is that natural to me as a man, or is it an acquired habit? just something I was taught to do in school? I don't know. Put that layer of analysis back in a file somewhere in my head and wait for the deeper, experiential level. I am looking at the Pacific beach, which is right in front of me now.

Wait a minute. What about all the stuff of my life that came before?

Now I am a Christian, have been since 1979, or maybe even before that when I was raised Catholic. So, to base my analyses and judgements about life, its consequences, priorities and outcomes, etc on an ancient Revelation, the Bible, the church--what is that? How does that affect any objective analysis I may attempt? Well, sure it does.

Hey, It's what I am. I was born into a specific place and time, with all the cultural baggage thereof.But let's not get too analytical. By grounding my judgements on my own experience as well as ancient Revelation that was handed down to me through the ages, I am utilizing the best of both worlds-- the experience of those prophets of old, primarily Jesus himself, as well as my own experience.

Now, back to the here and now. Over here in the sand, dark bands are alternating with light. There is some kind of cycle going on here, some kind of process. Been going on a long time, seems to be universal. Seeing that cycle of sand bands with my eyes is objective. Relating them to other life cycles is subjective. Can I do otherwise? No matter what theses, hypotheses, or conclusions I come to, I am a subjective man, and I will make use, in this life, of both the objective truth that is really out there, the cumulative wisdom of other men/women, and my subjective experience and evaluation of it. I'm going for the best of them all. Do I have any other choice? My options are limited.

To be human means to understand that our options are limited, so we would do well to make the best of them. Rather than dwelling on what we don't understand, consider and act upon what we do find to be true and workable.

By the way, and I didn't tell you this before. Yesterday, I experienced the worst pain I have ever had in my life. This was no small thing for me, although in the big picture it is insignificant. It's over now. That's the main thing. But the pain experience has produced an aftermath.

How did this pain happen? I had had a bout with walking pneumonia or something like it before we left North Carolina. My head was all stopped up with mucous or sinus fluid or whatever that stuff is that's stuck in your head when you've got a cold. While were in the plane descending to Costa Rica, I had the most terrible half-hour of pain in my life, because I had not done the cold medications effectively.

Now this is getting pretty dam subjective, talking about pain and my health condition, like the 62-year-old-geezer that I have become. I hate it, don't want to go that route. I'm not stuck in the wheelchair at the nursing home yet. So fuhgedaboudit.

But I do have to say something about all that physical health report stuff, because there is a lesson in it.

So I'm sitting here on the strand with my old thoughts about the universality of the surf and sand, and my right ear is still clogged with that stuff from yesterday's struggle against walking pneumonia. I've been trying for days now to get rid of that mucous.

I tilt my head to the right. Something--a liquid--shifts inside my head, and suddenly I can hear more clearly.

Thanks be to God!

Maybe you think that crediting God for such deliverance from pain is a naive assumption. Who cares? It's my life, my ear, pain. I will deal with it. I am not only going to thank God for this little relief that came in the tilting of a head,in the blinking of an eye, but I am going to use my God-given hands to begin to solve the problem.

What will happen if I gently put my little finger in my ear and manipulate that ear canal ever-so-slightly while my head is tilted? Could such intervention, perhaps, release some of the fluid from the ear and thus alleviate some pain? I'll try it.

I do it.

It works! Clogged ear now clearer than it was.

Praise be to God. Thank you Jesus!

Pretty subjective response, I know--this burst of grateful praise, but I'll gratefully accept the little strand of divine deliverance, even though I was the one who administered it.

Now, as for conclusions and evaluations about this insignificant event while contemplating sand, waves and the universe:

The cycle of pain and absence of pain--it comes; it goes. When the pain comes, it's hell on earth, but when it's gone--Thank you, God. A man's gotta roll with the tide. I'll take it. Not bad for a Friday morning.

Glass half-Full

Kai kai Kauai

Surfy shimmer late afternoon slant light
hath revealed glimmering
truth that midday overlooked,
as each wave topples in from aquamarine bliss
blasting gold and magic disappearish foam upon the beach.
Silvery rumpled water plane retreats back to sea
leaving sheen that descends into coarse brownsand,
mottled with micro rivulets crisscrossing intersecting
as multiple mini-sandstorms settle from their infinite mini-maelstroms
upon this shore,
racing, streaking wavelets o'er the smoothness of ancient speckled sands
where sandstonish texture takes over as crystalish water is disappearing
constantly and forever
and ever and amen
according to shapeshifting strand line as erratic as
a dowjones database
Jackie Paper will sail no more on this particular
day
but the sun sets down its golden splashes same as
it always has since
God only knows when.

Glass half-Full

Kauai kai

First is the sunshine, everywhere
bright on this deep Pacific blue; way out there
Puff blows up his silver-whites
and pushes them into distant cumulus piles
onto absolutely flat
horizon.
From there afar sapphire stretches at me
rolling into nearer aquamarine
then clearer azure.
The ocean surfs in, tossing frothy white
o'er brown-gold beach, sloshing
sparkles
everywhere, all the way up
into micro wavelets of universal energy;
they flatten
in sine shadow lines that skitter across the cosine sand.
Eons away from any continent
and far far far from any heckled world
in a land called Hanalei,
Hawaii and Thee
I see.

Glass half-Full

BodySurfer's Intuitive Calcs

Ocean waves, generated by the interplay of lunar and earth gravity, travel very long distances across open water. When a wave reaches land, having no more water in which to move forward, it breaks upon the shore. How many millennia have humans been observing this? A long time.

Standing in shallow water very near the shoreline, we would see the hapless bodysurfer waiting to experience the thrill of catching a wave and riding it the short distance until he and the wave are tossed onto the sandy beach. If you happened to be at Ka'anapali beach, Maui, Hawaii, yesterday, that adventurous bodysurfer would have been, perhaps, me, or one of the other hundreds of free-floating small-time adventurers.

The body surfer is not a real surfer, you know. He's just a clueless vacation visitor, not really serious about investigating the larger potentials of the great swells on the north shores of these far-flung islands. He doesn't have the board. He just has his own body, which he has trained to float. In my case, I learned to float at YMCA summer day camp in Jackson, Mississippi, long about 1956 or so.

Consider one wave coming in--the one that I'm going to jump into in just a few seconds here. How does this little dance between the wave and the bodysurfer work?

When the wave is still out in deep water where there is nothing to alter its somewhat ideal sine, or cosine, or bell-jar shape, it is a force of energy moving through the water, rearranging the shape of the water surface as it moves forward. It is moving the water somewhat, mostly up and down, at any chosen point of the ocean surface. Within the force of the wave there is kinetic energy moving those millions of molecules of H²0. But the wave is not really moving as much water, or anything else, as it actually has the physical power to do. So within the wave there is, along with the kinetic energy that is in constant use, potential energy.

So every wave that travels across the Pacific, approaching the beach, is a combination of both kinetic energy and potential energy. When the kinetic force of it hits the beach, the potential energy is suddenly converted to strong kinetic action and the wave totally expends itself on the sand. All that physical force erupts upon the shore and upon whatever happens to be there, be it a surprised snoozing sunbather, a sand castle, or a bodysurfer like me. Over long periods of time, this wave action churns rocks down into fine sand, and this is how we get our beaches. It also steals sunglasses and plastic cups and rubber rafts and other stuff that we consumers drag to the strand with us.

What the bodysurfer seeks to do is partake of that thrilling moment within the wave when its potential energy is instantaneously being converted to kinetic force, and thereby producing for him/her a few seconds of very fine sporting excitement. This occurs when the wave's natural shape is being violently altered by its contentious encounter with the sandy bottom. Entering shallow water, that potential energy has nowhere to put all those water molecules that were formerly being moved up and down in such a gentle, rolling manner. Suddenly there is no more "down" available to the wave, because where there was deep water before there is now something solid that does not yield to the wave's force. In this case, the "something solid" is the edge of the island, i.e. the shore.

So the rambunctious wave tosses all those water molecules up into the air, in a kind of tantrum. Like a spoiled child that has grown accustomed to having its way all the time, the wave shouts with much sound and fury that signifieth nothing, if I can't have my wavy way here, I'm going to throw all this liquid in the air! Waugh! Now it's splash and crash time.

So suddenly the formerly tame motion becomes an eruption of spray through the air, and foam upon the sand. That noble wave that hath traveled afar all the way from Japan or wherever--it just gives up the ghost and dies right there on the coast of Hawaii.

But not before this thrill-seeking tourist can get in on a little super-planetary wave action, ha! I love it.

Glass Chimera

Planetary birth pangs

Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about three or four miles down below the water surface, our planetary home gave birth to Hawaii.

As Father in Heaven had sewn within Mother Earth's deep crevices the seeds of creative planetary development, she cried out from the Deep in her anguish when the aweful time of delivery had come. With wailings of hot magma and rumblings of steamy contraction, Mama pushed out those volcanic islands-to-be. Spewing forth from her ocean floor, striving upward from her tectonic fissures, the nascent super-hot lava tumbled and rolled skyward from beneath its tectonic birthplace, into cold Pacific waters. Then, after a few million years of childlike submersion under watery tutelage, these pubescent islands stuck their stony little heads out into air and proclaimed to the birds and the stars that they had at last arrived, ready to be transformed as the land of the living.

Yesterday, we were walking on some of those rocky island shoulders. We watched with fascination as vehement Pacific waves pounded her dark lava extremities with ceaseless planetary fury, casting high cascades of spray into the blue sky with airy veils of aquamarine and silver-white brilliance. The basaltic wasteland whereon we trod was sculpted with moonish alacrity, revealing with otherworldly starkness layers of black, grey, reddish brown-- solid rock punctuated with massive boulders, cracky protrusions, some rounded by the rushing of the water and wind, others still sharp with the newness of elemental violence.

Then, there is was. A small carpet of vivid green something living, splayed upon the barren rock, growing as merrily as you please in the sunshine, with little orange-tipped teardrop succulent leaves spreading across the lithic void.

"That," said the traveler to his nephews and nieces, is the beginning of dirty old life.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The power of the universe

With impressive regularity, the moon orbits the earth every 28 days or so. This arrangement produces some very real effects on what happens to us and to our planetary home.


Long ago when I was in school, I learned that the mysterious white orb up in the night sky has a gravity of its own. Like every object that exists anywhere, it has a power to compel other objects in its direction. This gravity attribute of matter, which is proportional to its mass, is an important part of the mechanics of the universe. An intricate clockwork of physical events is constructed around it. Thanks to Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, among many other wise men who lived long ago, for figuring this out.

I suppose heavenly objects are a little like people in this respect--possessing a kind of magnetism that produces a sphere of influence. But among humans the attractive forces are relatable more to personality, leadership, status, charm, and such immeasurable factors, rather than a person's size, or what the physicists call 'mass'.

But I was thinking about the moon because of what happened two days ago when Pat and I were at the beach; it was a scary event that is indirectly related to the moon's orbit around us. Now as I write this the moon's glory is fading, as its master the sun renders it invisible while I watch the sun come up over the island of Maui, Hawaii. Being awake so early, I must still be on east coast time, even though its been a week ago since I was there.

But about the moon...Mostly we tend to think of gravitational forces between earth and moon in terms of the earth's greater gravity (due to its larger mass.) We see in the night sky the moon doing its thing, sort of hanging there night after night, seeming to travel an arc across the nocturnal sky as dusk pulls its curtain of darkness across the heavens, until dawn comes blasting all that blackness away, with sunny brightness and life-giving warmth.
We are forever accustomed to the fact that our earth powerfully determines the moon's behavior. But their cosmological connectedness works both ways. That little white sphere, so hopelessly tethered by gravity to its giant companion, exerts an unyielding, and quite predictable, effect over our worldy substance.

This dynamic is most easily observed in our oceans. Collectively, they are an immense resource that no one can measure. But the little old moon, even as small as it seems to us, pushes our oceans around like plasmic silly putty all the time, every day and night. That precocious dimpled satellite grabs, for instance, our largest planetary mass, the Pacific ocean, at one end, so to speak. As earth revolves, the moon fluffs its massive surface waters like a great oceanic blanket, wrinkling it all the way from Canada to Australia, crumpling it from Japan to Chile, and everywhere in between and beyond.

Tremendous physical forces of nature are set in motion through thousands of miles of water, producing the tides, the ocean swells, waves on the beach.

Right in the middle of all that lunar-induced force field of liquid dynamism is a string of islands we call Hawaii, which is where I now write this. Down there on the beach, which I am beginning to see again in the widening light of dawn, a wave crashes in the sand. It crashes because all that lunar-inflicted energy, which has passed in wave form across thousands of sea-miles, is suddenly resisted, and stopped, by a physical object--the beach. The mixture of energy in the wave--it may have been (guessing) 70% potential energy and 30% kinetic--is uproariously transformed into 100% (?) kinetic energy as it strikes the shore and dissipates.

A couple of days ago, Pat and I, fools that we are, happened to be standing in that Maui surf, when the awesome power of the universe, having been channeled by our feisty little tide-jerking earth-moon through the oceanic medium, came crashing against us with a force we had never heretofore experienced. The big wave came as the first among a set of whoppers; it whipped Pat and me around like rag dolls for a few fearful seconds. Having been caught clueless in a tenacious explosion of kinetic water energy, we were lucky to recover and walk away from its ferocity, back to our little beach blanket island of sun-screen and security.

Well, not lucky--actually, more like "saved." Saved by God, who is greater, and more benevolent, than all the jerky universe that stirs us around like fruity chunks in a beach-blender.
Do you think me naive to assume such a thing as God's protection in the midst of a terrible wave? It's okay. You may say that I'm a naive believer, but I'm not the only one. Another believer, one from ages long ago, wrote this about that same power of the universe, (from Psalm 93):

"The seas have lifted up, O Lord,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves,
mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea--
the Lord on high is mighty."

Glass half-Full

Planetary power

I was walking in the dusky part of a day along a beach strand of the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. That's where surfers gather to ride the biggest waves in the world.
I looked to the horizon, contemplating the sunset. Its radiant light beams pierced the fluffy clouds as bright spears. You've seen this scene, haven't you?, in your dreams, or perhaps in some photograph.
The radiant beams are 93-million mile-long electromagnetic vectors sent to energize our planet. Though appearing now as straight lines, the sun's rays are known to be waves. They travel in infinitesimally small ups and downs with amplitudes of precious gifts for our planet--power to photosynthesize our air and warmth to make our fragile lives possible.
I looked out at the wild ocean. Great swells of wave energy were rolling in through the waters, all the way from somewhere between Kamchatka and Alaska. The moon tugs mightily upon our planet, having its gravitous way with our wide waters while the land remains relatively steadfast. Unobstructed by any terra firma for thousands of miles, these immense north shore waves roll upon the Hawaiian island with immense poundings of physical force. Changing from deep, sapphire blue in the distance to sparkling emerald green as they mount their assault upon the shore, they are titans of planetary power that dissipate rather suddenly to nothingness between the course, brown sand grains of the beach. Where do they go?
Gazing down at the wavelets that lap around my feet, I discover that those inbound giants, having such great magnitude just a moment ago, have translated into smaller and smaller ripples; they project their diminishing images as a multitude of shadowy intersecting interference patterns upon the sand. Late afternoon hues of azure and pink enfold the entire golden sand scene in bright sparkles.
Waves, waves, it seems that all the universe is waves. All of nature is curvy and crashing and chaotic.
Yet, as I survey once again the translucent aquamarine swells pounding this Pacific shore, suddenly the image of an emerald green crystal forms in my mind; it is absolutely straight and monolithic in linear perfection. So nature is not all curvy and crashing chaotic? Something is putting it together. How amazing is that?
Oh God, here comes another huge one. Look!