I Cooked by Moonlight

Water calms me. Pools, lakes, streams, waterfalls, bays, inlets, especially the sea. I sometimes wonder to myself why this is.

Is it the saltiness of the air, the sand under my toes? Is it the endless unbroken expanse of the horizon as I look out over the ocean? the sunsets? the sunrises?

Water, in all forms, brings soothing to this soul in many ways. After all, we aren't only carbon-based life forms, but water-based life forms as well. This is the Blue Planet.

I visited one of my favorite campgrounds in Florida last week, a natural beach state park preserve. It is an uncrowded, undeveloped stretch of beach, with shifting sand dunes and natural flora. The sunsets are like watercolors; the nearby town is named Watercolor for this reason.

There, past the dunes, the ocean sits, lives, moves, breathes. It looks the same yet continually changing. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The ocean, the singular answer to the final checklist that most brides discuss with their mothers and maids on their wedding day. We borrow this ocean, and rest of this entire planet, from our children's children's children's children, or so the saying goes. It's blue, sometimes green, it's old and it's new.

There is constant renewal and constant steadfastness, the oceans patterning the planets movements, the movements of the Sun, the moons and the other stars.