Low Tide - Cape Cod

Walking the Beach. Asking myself why I have to walk a certain distance at a certain pace while others are playing on shining flats in low tide. A couple in their beach chairs. One reading and one with his face to the sun. On I trudge in the soft sand taxing my body a bit. I soon have my pace established and notice three girls and an older female playing on a small flat that had become a little shoreline island. The sand was silver grey and shining due to the slight slaver of water covering their playland. The older female was alive with the joy of the soft, misty, warm air that played in the atmosphere. She danced ungracefully lifting her legs high and twisting her body one way and then another. The children ranging from petite to adolescent where equally charmed by their little island of pleasure in their playing and running . Unbounded pleasure is what I saw. Human life released from the fetters of the everyday. Walking further a man and a boy were gathering driftwood for what looked to be a fire mound. The boy was fully engaged in this task. He was working at it and wore a two piece military-like outfit, while his father or grandfather in a swimsuit sauntered along side with his belly draped unselfconsciously over his floppy swimpants. With my goal reached, I turned around and walked back with the sun behind me. The island of playing females was illuminated and their animated bodies clad in
colorful bathing suits darting in many directions, still charged with the excitment of this unhibited freedom to be. Walking along the flats behind me figures were dark against the silver sea. Their adult forms moved with concentration as they leaned over and picked up something causing them to gather and study the object. All of these figures were no more than twelve inches high in the perspective I was watching them from. So I had a panoramic view of life on the beach, the flats, the sky, the ocean with its brilliant silver sun stripes generated by a rippling incoming tide. It was all quiet action. I could not hear them. It was life in motion. If they had stopped to consider me, I would be life in motion. I understood my walk better now. The couple enjoying their rest. The females captured by joy. The man and the boy building something together. The dark human forms gathering around an object found. The steel blue sky and ocean with ripples of silver almost sacred in their presence. Life.