A fresh green scent mixed with the salty air as I walked along the trail through the dimly lit stands of sea grape and oat grass toward the ocean. Osprey in flight called to each other from the tops of the tall pines. I stepped beyond the shrubs and onto the soft, silvery sand. The tide was low, exposing a vast expanse of beach fringed along the shoreline with shallow pools of water. A glowing band of coral light across the eastern horizon cast a subtle glow all around.
Waves crested lazily onto the beach and spilled into the shallow pools, creating small ripples that traveled across the water. The rebounding ripples interfered with oncoming waves, exchanging energy with each other and filling the surface with a geometric dance of infinite troughs and crests. Out beyond the pools, sea-going birds alternately plummeted toward the ocean and soared across the sky while fishing for their breakfast.
All at once, the coral pink color of morning began to seep from the horizon onto the clouds above, except for where a distant thunderhead cast two conspicuous streaks of gray shadow. A spectacle of iridescent light began to fill the sky as the long rays of morning sun stretched across the Earth's curved surface.
With the increasing amount of daylight, I began to notice ripples of sand at the bottom of the pools which mimicked the movement of the water that formed them. Some of the sand ripples broke the water's surface creating linear chains of tiny islands floating in a sea of pink and blue. These ripples looked very much like those preserved and hardened in the sandstones I collected as a geology student in college. Layer upon layer of wavering sediments deposited over hundreds of millions of years under the same sun and perhaps on a morning just as beautiful as this.
Further up the beach I saw a banded sea star on thousands of tiny, undulating legs slowly making its way toward the water, its appendages leaving long furrows in the wet sand. A small crowd gathered around to watch the progress, until a knowledgeable man stepped in to say that the star would die if it remained on land too long. He gathered up the creature into his hands, its arms threading through his fingers and trailing down the sides of his palms, and gently carried it to the rippling shallows as the sun peeked over the horizon.
