Weekapaug in Spring

An Opening

A prayer has overtaken me. Humbled me. Struck me down. Opened me up. Another wordless vision, this one free of thought. Here I go again.

***

My lived experience has been slowing, quieting more, becoming less — less of what, I do not know. I’m not sure of when this began. Most people I know feel quite the opposite these days. But with this slowing, I crave the simple sunrise even more, especially on beaches, alone at least in body, yet feeling folded into all of it. Everything is elemental. The essence of the world dream is here — salt and water, wind and waveforms, rising light. And how many times while walking a beach have I heard the wind in such a way that I turn around as if something was just spoken that I couldn’t quite make out? For me, such wind whispers occur on open beaches — and come to think of it, in the winter woods, too.

One summer-warm, late spring morning some years ago, on a beachhead across this very ocean, I first learned to hear the Word in the unending surf, to take it in and live it forward. I hear this Word in a Catholic Latin Mass and in the chanting of a Sikh blessing from Gurmukhi script — this Word unencumbered by language. All these are steps along the way toward no words, toward no sound, toward a silence this world cannot possibly hold.

A way is being shown me. And the way is slowing as I approach.

***

It is Sunday morning, and I’m driving through the dark for two hours to arrive at Weekapaug Beach in Rhode Island so I may look off at the infinite ocean and walk the sand as daylight arrives. I feel as though I’ve been ushered into this by unfolding circumstance. Sometimes, the Word is spoken as a shift in a day’s plans — an allowing, one could say. Perhaps nature really does abhor a vacuum. The Rhode Island coastal sky forecast as posted this morning may not favor a clear sunrise, but I’m unfazed. As many of us like to say, “things have a way of working out.”

This is my third trip to Weekapaug — first was in the sweet, early days of last autumn, then again during the dead of winter when the sand was frozen firm, unyielding underfoot.

As I arrive thirty minutes before dawn, a slab of cloud cover is lumbering off to the east-southeast, its trailing edge breaking up. The sky above me and behind to the west is clear. I am hopeful that the sun might have its way with the clouds in the rising. It is about 60 degrees, the air holds a light breeze, the tide is low, and these two-to-four-foot waves breaking onto the beach are arriving as fading Atlantic swells. Walking eastward on the firm sand along the break, I am alone here.

The sun is at play behind the fleeing clouds now, ricocheting light all about — here and there, shifting rays of light are escaping through the fraying trailing edges. For one scant moment, I catch an orange beam as it bends to the south, flicks out to sea, and bounces off the hull of a distant vessel underway off Block Island.

Just before the sun finally appears more properly from out of the cloud cover, a riot of terns suddenly takes to the air from out of the nesting area they share with piping plovers in the dune grass — a chaotic, joyful mess of flight that swirls all around me. In little more than a minute, they vanish, presumably back into the dunes, which leaves me to wonder what might have caused the uproar in the first place.

***

The sun now full and clear above the clouds, I turn and walk back to the western end of the beach in that warm, delicious golden light, listening to the Word of the hissing, pounding surf, and contemplating a quiet, simple prayer of opening.

That I may open more and seek less, for everything I’ve been seeking has been with me forever and forever. To be open is to see this, know this, be this.

The beautiful beach is big and open and allowing of everything. It is undisturbed by anything that happens on it. It never refuses. Today it has allowed me yet another solitary walk at dawn. And I don’t know when I have ever felt more open-hearted, rested, and available to everything than I do right now and here. Maybe I’m becoming more like the beach. I feel nearer to that silence having nothing to do with an absence of sound. Resistance is on its last legs, struck down and humbled.

Now, to bring this home. There is light everywhere.

Peace,

Stephen