Ocean Tides and Shore Treasures

We start and end each day with an hour or two walk along the beach. Bob hunts for sharks' teeth and I've shifted my search from shells to beach glass. Somehow the time drifts away while we're absorbed in walking and searching and the hours pass quickly. I find myself singing as I walk along; sometimes old hymns, other times tunes I invent myself, usually little love songs to the ocean. Bob seems to always be walking far ahead of me. Nobody hears me over the sounds of the winds and waves, although I don't know if I would stop even if they did. It's just me and the ocean together at these times.

It intrigues me how much the surface of the sand changes over the course of a day. About every six hours the tide changes; the waves advance and recede and leave surprising and unexpected patterns of sand and shells that I seem to see with greater appreciation each day. It feels endlessly entertaining and exciting, as though I am watching a master artist create a magnificent canvas, erase and then create anew with each new tide.
One of the other "finds" on the Amelia Island beaches have been these shell fragments. The marks evidently were carved on their surfaces by predators as they attempted to breach the shells and eat the juicy morsels inside. The marks suggest language symbols to me; I am looking forward to sketching some of them and combining the forms into new combinations. I find it most intriguing that some marks are fine lines and others are very wide and deep.

I'm not sketching or writing or doing anything artistic at all but taking photographs, walking. Looking, always looking. The clouds move and change, the sky brightens and darkens, the tide moves in and out, the shells wash up on the sand and then wash back into the water. I walk, eat, sleep and walk some more. I watch the clouds, the sky, the waves, the people, and scour the beached shells for little treasures. I wonder if I would take this all for granted if I lived by the ocean all the time.