Musings While Walking on Cinnamon Beach

Ocean spray, new mown grass, fresh paint breezes between sunscreen, beer and yesterday’s un-showered sweat.

A few steps more, a bloodied rock, a closer look, is it red paint?

A pelican extends its slender gray neck, snatches a fish, turns its beak to the heavens and swallows deeply, neck quivering in spasms and gulps. The half-eaten fish, its tail visible and shivering. I zip up my jacket against the wind.

Another half mile down the beach, a dead pelican lies in hurricane ravaged dunes. Flattened feathers, legs askew, half-buried in whitewashed shell pieces, mortared and pestled by last week’s winds, hidden in shadows of late afternoon, amid other detritus washed up from sky to water to sand and land and back again. The pelican appears to resemble a weathered gray mass of driftwood, like one of those odd sculptures shaped by local hands. A seagull squawks and I jump, surprised by the piercing interruption.

I sit, lulled by inner whorls and swirls of hypnotic sea sounds.  A burnt orange shell winks at me in sunlight, hinting of sea stories. Yesterday’s yin yoga chants through my body, drifting, shifting, searching for the scent of home displaced decades before across another ocean.

Sighing seas. Inspiration. You on the receiving end of my exhalation.

I almost trip over a thick twisted rope, knotted, weathered, torn, shredded, fibers like human hair. What strained against these ropes, now bright green with sea moss, and hot chili peppered by the salt spray’s saucing, slicing, dicing.

I wonder what lies beneath,

under the sand.

Perhaps, a pirate’s earring?

my feet my shadow sideways