There’s so much to see on this coast and so many things we’ve seen before, but even more remains elusive. We return again and again and are never really certain about the deeper quality of things we try to study, but our curiosity brings us back in the hopes of finding the key to the mystery we are trying to comprehend. There are many pieces competing for our attention as we are torn between sky, sea, creatures, plants, sounds, weather, smells, and the myriad of sensual pleasures that caress senses hungry to explore the unknown. We never really gain familiarity.
What is it about familiarity that dulls that desire? We live in an amazing place in its own right, the Sonoran Desert, and yet we don’t wander with the same intensity as we do when outside our ordinary. I say this, but do I really believe it? We are charmed by the birds, cactus, lizards, smell of the wet desert, thunderstorms, arid wide open spaces, exposed jagged rocks, and the bursts of color that come and go. Maybe it’s the barbaric state of the metropolis we live in, with its labyrinth of cinder block fences isolating angry and pretentious people. How does money sterilize a place to remove the free flow of happiness and joy? To explore an environment unencumbered by a grim understanding of the meaninglessness of its inhabitants is a luxury, and so, visiting places we are unfamiliar with gains precious bandwidth within our sense organs to absorb it all. Being an outsider has its advantages.
Our lives are too short to have them intertwined with the nonsense of others who are selling you their meaning or, worse, their appearance. Allowing one’s self to dive deeper within is hampered by the superficial curiosity of other people’s dramas, politics, and celebrity. The famous become the worst exemplars of this parasitic culture: The more we are interested in them, the richer and more powerful they become. They continually strive to draw the spotlight on themselves with ever more absurd acts of intellectual barbarity. While not on par with the spectacle of the Roman Circus with fights to the death, the modern gladiators battle one another, producing madness in the audience.
Trees, mushrooms, newts, and crashing waves will not enrage you. Lichen, billowy clouds, raindrops, and grand vistas only cost you time to fall in love with them, allowing you to revel in what they might mean to you. Never will you need to raise a fist at the vibrancy of moss-draped over rocks and on the branches of trees. Nature, in some ways, is free, and it’s always unbiased. We humans with our egos are afraid we are missing out on something amongst ourselves because we’ve been conditioned to desire wealth and fame. Knowledge from witnessing the natural world cannot become personal wealth as the age of Humboldt is dead. Instead of feeding the mind and imagination, we yearn for adoration as we strive to do something that will have us recognized. This is not being human; it is being a shallow facade that places us in the insect kingdom or worse.
What does it mean to enrich our sense of wonder by walking along the ocean, watching the light change over and over again as clouds and the sun compete for our attention? The jellyfish on the shore is a corpse when we encounter it, but we can imagine it floating effortlessly in the current while it was still alive. The grasses up on the dunes might be invasive, but they look soft and warm to our eyes as they gently outline the contours of the land. These visions of beauty join a wealth of gathered knowledge and memories. They are the currency of venturing out and exploring. I should point out that this form of cash is also collected when going within because books, too, bring us into our imagination and help paint the way we see the world around us.
These pieces of nature make a composite whole, the scale of which only grows larger the more we see of it. Try to reconcile just a fraction of what you might see in a lifetime, and you’ll be hardpressed to understand the tiniest of elements, their relationships lost in infinite connections. Trying to understand the atoms in the universe, how each of them relates to others, and what roles they play in every molecule they belong to is a fool’s task, so it is trying to comprehend this 338 miles (544km) of Oregon coastline. And yet, we keep returning, trying to figure out something profound. What our intentions really are, we cannot easily explain.
We are running out of time up here, and as usual, we will make a last-minute race to points along the way, thinking that if we could just pull those things together in some comprehensive manner, they would succinctly give us the keys to the universe and we could start to focus on something else. Maybe our investment with so much time up here is giving us some familiarity, but deep understanding will always remain elusive as our quest is too far beyond our grasp to ever satisfy this yearning.
Today should be the day when I concede defeat that I might ever know Nature. But if I cannot know Nature, how might I ever truly know my place in it? Are we wasting our precious lives chasing the dreams others place in our heads so they might live their own dreams of having it all? The newt gives me nothing in return for my appreciation. On the contrary, it gives me everything that is intangibly unimportant in our current world. The same goes for the rest of my life I witness on these all-too-brief journeys into coastal Oregon. Yet I leave far wealthier and happier for having shared this time within this massive ecosystem of love. I’m claiming it is love, as I derive as much joy from it as I do in the most romantically intense moments with my wife.
So, when we are outside of Nature, are we outside of love? Of course, we are never truly outside of Nature in the literal sense, but we are in the intellectual constructs of a media-driven circus that has monopolized far too many people’s identities and souls. In this sense, we are in our own simulation or, let’s say, the simulation of creators and capitalists. Ask yourself, who really built the filters of how you perceive your world? Do you dare challenge your role, your god, your career, your biases, or what entertains you?
I know the discomfort of challenging all of those things, and it comes with a good dose of isolation. Ask any nerd who grapples with identity and self-perception how difficult this pandemic-induced self-isolation is, and by and large, I’m certain they will tell you the same thing, “I’ve been living like this most of my life.” It’s not that we ever wanted isolated lives, but we’ve been outside the embrace of love for so long that sooner or later, we must accept our role. Not only did our peers find us different, likely due to our abundance of extraordinary curiosity, but our parents, too, felt alienated from the child they found bookish, eccentric, gay, tomboyish, peculiar, or seemingly uncomfortable with themselves since their interests were their own instead of their parents. We grew up without the confidence that love brings to people.
I suppose my impossible goal while in the wilds of nature is to see more of more, to hear all that is unheard in the silence, and to find the scents beyond the capability of my nose. That, by my definition, is love; it is intimacy. If we are lucky in life, we might find that partner who also cherishes the quiet moments of soft touch, delicate smells, and the sounds of heartbeats and breaths. In a sense, this is what I’m looking for in my relationship with the outside world. In our close and personal moments, when love is dictating the soft passion of being lost in discovery, we find our most magnificent time of being mindless and largely outside of thought. If we are thinking about work, politics, sports, rumors, or the heavy drama of a TV show, we will not find ourselves caressing the shoulder, neck, or arm of our loved ones, lingering timelessly while locked in a reassuring embrace.
When we race to have it all, neither we nor our partners are quite satisfied. It is the same in Nature. We cannot arrive, see, and have conquered the place. Seeking the relationship of love, we’ll want to know more. We’ll have no choice but to know more, or we’ll be left wondering what the attraction was. Rarely does love at first sight work unless we are passionately self-aware and happen to stumble upon someone or someplace else who is also beholden to this quality. Yes, I just wrote “someplace” as I want to believe that just as I fell in love with someone who was looking for a similar type of person, able to love, Nature must have an abundance of love intertwined within its complexity for those who are attuned to finding it.
So, if Nature is embracing me in love, it would make more sense to me that as I wake, I find this desire to explore and touch its softer, more subtle corners, allowing me to bask in a day of sensual discovery. This is the hallmark of love.
Maybe Nature is love? And while there is a fierce side of it, discompassionate for the comings and goings of all that is required to sustain it, there is that time, if we are lucky enough, in which we might find a window of opportunity to roam within the freedom of love. To always seek intellectual meaning in life is to negate the thing that is right in front of us, but love is also the thing that might require the most rigorous analysis from a species that has gotten caught up with labels, utility, wealth, and status. Moving through the complexity of science, function, philosophy, religion, consumerism, and other distractions that busies our minds, what is left on the other side is love.
While I’ve not been everywhere, from the places I have been, I cannot say I’ve ever met a biome I didn’t like. Stand at the ocean, and you’ll see it push things out of it. Bits of life disgorged from this vast sea set out on land; sometimes, it even crawls out, but most of what comes ashore is pushed by the force of the current. At some point, these shells, plants, crabs, shells, and the algae foam chasing across the slickwater sand in the Annual Foamberg Reggata will all just disappear. You also were pushed into life, you only have minutes to look up at the sun unencumbered and free to bask in the warmth of the sunshine. Don’t waste that precious time, as you’ll not gain another second when the end comes.
The impressions have been made, but they’ll have to linger in the pot of memories melding with the myriad of other human ingredients collected in my head. If I’m lucky, they’ll emerge in future writings; otherwise, they go to the grave with me someday, my existence wiped off the beach, dragged back into the ocean of life. As this journey unfolds, I can only hope my shared words so far capture something of what I was able to distill along the way, but I will have to wait to learn what filters through my mind as I work on sorting what may have held importance. What are people waiting for? We cannot grasp the joys of love and discovery in chasing dead and hollow icons. Our minds and emotions are the temples that are supposed to be filled with the treasures of experience. These can only be collected through a kind of vulnerability where we recognize our ignorance of most everything and our need for the embrace of love found in others willing to share with us while we give of ourselves.
Love is right in front of you; it’s all around you, below and above you. Again, I have to think about the Navajo Beauty Way Prayer with beauty all around us. Isn’t that just another way of saying love is all around you and that we walk in love?
Our day represented in this blog entry doesn’t follow my usual narrative of photo, impressions, photo; these words are more about the arch of our trip through my perception, as thoughts bring on new ideas and conclusions that were somehow part of the time I contemplated aspects of moments.
As for the day itself, we started with a long walk on Manzanita Beach before heading south and crossing the Nehalem River, which is the broad panorama nine photos down from the top. Our next stop was at Nedonna Beach between Nehalem Bay and Rockaway Beach. The third location is right next to the Three Graces near the mouth of Tillamook Bay between Rockaway Beach and Garibaldi. After returning to Tillamook, we headed out to Cape Meares but never made it as we detoured out to Bayocean, where a townsite once stood before being claimed by the ocean. Our afternoon walk brought us up to 12 miles (19.3km) of steps for the day, with the majority of them accumulated on a deserted beach with no one else in sight.
For the third night running, we lounged in the hot tub under a moon, inching ever closer to fullness. I nearly forgot to mention that our Cozy Cottage also has an outdoor shower, which, of course, we took advantage of. The place was cleaned up tonight, and the car was mostly packed, so we can get an early start in the morning as we start our drive southeast towards home.
In the calm of the early evening on still-reflective waters, our sense of awe draws us in to pause and sigh at our good fortune. We have the time, inclination, ability, and resources to venture into ourselves while simultaneously moving out of the potential trap of being cozy at home. We do not wish to grow old in the sense of becoming bitter and fixed in our ways. Growing old to become majestic like a Sequoia or Redwood while still branching out seems like an apt metaphor as we age. The clouds reflected in the waters are how those who reach maturity and wisdom should be reflected in those younger people who are still gathering experience. This is the image of tranquility, where the transition from day to night, water to sky, and earth to heavens waits with limitless opportunity for us to discover how we fit into the whole.