Beach Report: Yesterday and Today

According to the Washington Post and other sources, the Innuit language has at least 50 words for snow. There ought to be that many words to describe the grays, blues, greens, and silvers that color the ocean. Probably we need a dozen words for pink and lavender too. Maybe a few words for gold while we're at it. It never looks the same to me.

And there's the human component. People can't help making things.

Pygmy mammoths contemplating a return to the Channel Islands

Pygmy mammoths are a real thing--in case you don't already know. 

"In 1994, paleontologists made the remarkable discovery of a pygmy mammoth on Santa Rosa Island, the most complete collection of its kind in the world. Found only on the California Channel Islandsand nowhere else in the world, the pygmy mammothwas probably a small form of the Columbian mammothfound on the mainland."

And sometimes nature imitates nature.

Driftwood sealions frolic on the sand

The Eclipse

There have been other eclipses in recent memory,

http://leavingdivorceville.blogspot.com/2015/09/super-moonblood-moon-and-its-eclipse.html

http://leavingdivorceville.blogspot.com/2011/12/theres-total-eclipse-of-moon-going-on.html

but none quite like last night's. The moon was not a wafer, it was a fully dimensional sphere. It seemed so real in a way it hadn't been before, and it made this planet we live and breathe on seem more real too.

My mom loved  the moon, so of course I thought of her, and I remembered the night of a lunar eclipse a few years back when Dan and I went into McDonalds and tried to buy two senior coffees but couldn't come up with the full 1.20. The girl waiting on us thought we were homeless, I think, and she gave us the coffees anyway and filled up a little paper sack with creamers and sugars.

View from my patio

 No one offered me free coffee this morning but I did get out of my car on the beach and wander/wonder around a bit in my cheetah print pajamas covered up with a long tweed wool winter coat and a big scarf.

The moon hovering over a pink ocean at sunrise

There were other spectators too, and it was kind of a party without any talking. I saw two older women with canes and a thermos of coffee work their way to the top of the rocks where they filled their mugs and settled in.

Really, the whole thing was fabulous.

Sinking into the silver water

Wax your surfboards, the blue wave is coming!

I didn't make it to Washington D. C. this year or Los Angeles either because I just got home from a writer's residency, but Ventura's  march did not disappoint. The title of this post was my favorite sign today, but I didn't get a photo of it due to the shifting mass of people. The blue wave, the blue wave, yes.

Other signs:

Hoping for Words to Flow Like Water

Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the town that water built. Plaques mark the springs on Spring Street, and their entrances look like shrines, the stone arches set off with carefully manicured topiaries and pristine gravel paths bordered with plants. There are benches or stone tables where presumably once upon a time one might have been served the healing waters. Spring Street boasts bath houses that offer healing massages and steam rooms, and the sound of water singing in the limestone bluffs never seems far away.

I'm here to write, not bathe. But I know that words can also can also heal us.

Or dirty us. I'm trying to cut back a bit on reading our national news--or at least choose to read some things that offer a few drops of hope.