Beach

Next to last day of my vacation and I’m still less than relaxed. There is a stupid tune playing as background of my thoughts and, no, I do not know the words, and all I can think about is that the guy on the sand to my right has muttonchops. Muttonchops! He looks like a victorian military man just returning from a stint in India. I haven’t met a beard I could relate to since the 70’s but why is this one so annoying to me?

I took myself for a very long walk on the ebb tide beach. I hoped to walk off the chatter and judgment in my brain. I padded through beery foam, cross-scored sand and clean sparkle. My feet pressed evidence of the moment in the sand. I followed an intermittent, crinkling sand-sun and on and on I talked in my head above the incessant tune.

A gull pirated some bait in a Ziploc. He looked determined to swallow it whole. I tried to make him drop it, but failed. Later a large Black Backed Gull made off with a guy’s cell phone in a Ziploc and many people converged to make him drop it.

I walked for two and a half miles before I turned into the steps of my shadow and started back. The darker, undulating me moved like a very relaxed woman. I knew better. I could have screamed in frustration at not being able to quiet myself amid so much magic. I remember being a young girl at the beach, awake and mellow and blissfully empty inside after a beach day. That’s what I was looking for on this vacation. Emotional agendas always fail but I can’t seem to remember that. My youthful self clearly had fewer goals for the beach. I'd have been better off if I'd had none.

I saw something wonderful last Saturday. All along the beach and out to sea I could discern flecks of bright yellow. Butterflies, it seemed, all fluttering north along the coast. They winked between the bathers and further out to sea. No one appeared to notice them. They were loosely aligned, not in any way close to each other, but always, all day, I could see a dozen or so delicately working their way north. Eventually one of our party found a knowledgeable park ranger who told us they were Cloud and Cloudless Sulphurs migrating to Argentina. Apparently they preferred an eccentric route, north by northwest and into the wind. I get it.

Later, my umbrella blew completely inside out and Mr. Muttonchops, whose name I will never know, was the only one to come immediately and help me get it down. I am so sick of myself.

Though I didn’t get any photos from my beach walk, and though I felt I was ranting and humming the whole time, a part of me must have been present because my mental images of that day are clearer than my photographs.

Regarding the lost money and the good will I hope is following in its wake, (see prior post 'Supply') I was notified this week that my proposal for a large job has been accepted and I have an inquiry for another one of some substance. So money goes, money comes, Money will surely go and come again. My faith and my capacity to rest, like the Sulphur Moths, flicker in heavy wind and often seem to be going in the wrong direction.

beardcriticandbutterflyobserver@chincoteague

Supply

I am not in a funk. I am not. I arrived on vacation to discover that the $500 cash I’d brought to cover expenses had vanished from my pocket book. Certainly it plagued me into a measured and careful search but, having come up empty, I am attempting to let it go. Thank God, I have a little savings account with $700 in it. My emergency fund is covering.

The shock of finding the money gone, however, was something to contend with. It sat in my chest, the sense of loss, of fear, of intrusion, but I didn’t want to let those feelings get their claws into me. It’s vacation time and I wish to float. Courting relaxation and peering beneath the water with my goggles when I feel myself bumped by these feelings, I’m satisfied to let them go if I can.

Money has never mattered to me anyway unless I just happened to need some at the moment. Over the years money worries have been a recurrent and unsettling emotional issue. Having a well-honed sense of financial responsibility and also an inability to be motivated by money I have spent my artist’s life in a financial boundary water between the continent of fiscal solidity and the land of making things for the joy of the making. Rarely do those shores come close to each other. The tension created by these apparently irreconcilable differences has given me a lot to be curious about.

I am certain that in my whole life the loss of $500 will have no real impact. What has been impacted is the sense of security I felt believing I was financially prepared for this vacation. What has been aroused is my need to assign a cause to the loss, feel injured knowing how hard I worked for that particular $500 and, in other words, believing things I think of as mine are mine and should remain mine unless I give them away. I want to feel I have edges and surfaces and territory. I want to feel I am managing my life well. Still, I know the whole concept of ownership will not sustain scrutiny.

Where does supply come from? Logic tells me it comes from hard and smart work. But when I am working on commission, which is how I make my money, I am in the world of intuition and inspiration and trust. I am working solely to make a vision come to life, no matter how much money is in the contract. The same me that trusts itself to the flow of the work has to pay the bills. Over the years I’ve come to believe in the operation of some 'force,' I won’t try to label it, that supports me in the midst of complete uncertainty. It is a gifting watery force of some kind that always comes through eventually to keep me supplied even though there are a lot of boulders in the stream.


Relaxing in the sand on a mat behind the beach chairs, drying shirt flapping above me, the ocean thrum and hiss, I was sinking just beneath the surface of my thoughts and floating there, feeling marginally peaceful when suddenly I ‘knew’ what had happened to the money. Someone I was fond of had taken it and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Anything said or done would make a ‘thing’ ugly and destructive and no good likely to come of it. If I’m going to make a thing, I prefer it be interesting, evocative of spirit or beautiful. It should at least be pretty. Opening up the question of someone’s morality is none of that and I won’t do it.

Well then, that’s okay. Emotionally I will pry my fingers off the cash. I’m almost to the place where I can wish a blessing upon it and everyone who comes in contact with it. My hope is to forget about it completely. So when I catch my brain running the satisfying fantasy of throttling the culprit until their sneaky, thieving impulses are truly arrested, until they are shocked, until they suffer a feeling of violation, I feel a bit exasperated with myself, and that doesn’t make anything good either. It seems I need a bit of help forgiving. I invoke the river of abundance that has supplied me always and ask it for help.

Now I will nap. Let my onboard computer update while I give the old worn synapses of automatic reaction a time to rest. Let the invisible flow of Gift carry me to a better place.