An Interstitial Gap

I have the day off and my dog has decided to let me sleep in this morning. Thank you Ocean. You are the best! She really is. I honestly don’t know what I would do without her. She has been such a great companion especially since I moved out on my own over a year ago.

It’s a beautiful day out. Sunny skies but not quite as warm as yesterday. Still, it’s not at all cold out. It’s about 60 degrees as I leave at 10:00 but it feels warmer than that. It feels even warmer as I am getting out of my car at the beach parking lot. That sun feels so good.

There is a south offshore breeze blowing this morning. As I was watching the webcam on my phone earlier before leaving, I could see the movement of the water flowing north from the wind. However, it’s a relatively gentle movement. It’s not at all rough out in any way, shape or form.

I get to the sand and the beach is beautiful and the water is cold on my feet. The buoys are up a degree to 60 degrees from yesterday’s 59. My feet are not buying it. They are trying to convince me that I will surely die if I go any further into the water. I tell them that is a truly noble gesture on behalf of your sibling arms and legs, but I’m afraid we are all going in. I try to say this without any hesitation in my voice but I admit I am a little hesitant. That water feels cold.

Well out I go and I am laughing at myself because I just can’t seem to get myself to take the final plunge and I am coming up with all sorts of excuses with pictures that surely I need to take before I start swimming. Finally I just do it and what a relief. As I mentioned a couple posts ago, now the cold is in front of me and no longer on the inside of my head. In my head it will always be bigger than me. Now it is what it is but no more. I know exactly its limits and I know how to work with it.

I swim south into the breeze and I can definitely feel the water moving against me. Soon I get into a rhythm and I make sure and steady progress down the beach. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a Pelican fly right over me. I grab my camera as fast as I can, but I just can’t seem to get my finger positioned over the button in time. The bird is well in front of me by the time I get a shot and about a half second before, a wake from this breeze comes in between us and I can only make out the thin line of one of it’s wings floating headless above the surface.

I keep swimming and reach the end of the beach. I turn around and now the breeze is behind me. It seems like I spot cormorant after cormorant flying by in the opposite direction. Everyone is flying south today. I keep moving north with the assist of the wind swell.

Over the entire rest of the swim, my mind is dominated by the sound of music. It’s a piece of piano music I have been fiddling with for the last week at least. It follows a chord progression that is new to me and somewhat different from the patterns I have grown comfortable with. There are transitions from major to minor and root chords and inverted chords. Then there is a melody on top that I just have not been able to tie down. I’m hoping to resolve some of it on this swim. If I can just still my mind and let the notes play, maybe I can catch the melody in the act.

I truly enjoy letting this music play in my head. It helps to take my mind off of my thoughts. Where is it that music takes us to when we go beyond thoughts and memories and directly into the notes themselves? There are all sorts of feelings and colors but no faces or voices. I wonder if I have found some sort of interstitial gap between lives that I can now hear but not see. I wonder what it is I would find if I could lift the curtain and observe the true source of the music. Would I even recognize it? Would my human brain be able to make any kind of sense out of it?