The Waves Keep Coming

I admit it. I confess. I am a waveholic. I can’t get enough waves. My well-being seems to depend on them. My wild nature feeds off them.

Currently, I live just a few blocks from the sea. For nearly 20 years the Pacific Ocean has been a 20 minute or so drive away. Now it is minutes by car. When you live this close to the ocean’s deep presence, even when you can’t see or hear it, it becomes part of your psyche. You know there is a wild, untamed world powerfully lapping at the edges of your civilized routine and civilized pretensions.

The waves are the ocean’s insistence on being heard and noticed. Waves rhythmically drum on the living earth. Pulsing, waxing, waning. Tides expanding and contracting. Peeking, falling. A dénouement and release. The final push of the wave rushes over the sand’s surface reaching out as far as it can, then, when it realizes it can go no father, it pulls everything back into it. Pushing forward, pausing briefly and retreating back, repeating this for eternity.

In this part of the world, waves can be deadly. A huge wave may come as a surprise, a wave that is bigger and more powerful than the rest, as if it has decided that it will be the one to conquer the land once and for all. Each year people drown, bewildered to be powerlessly, plucked from the beach. You cannot turn your back on the sea, for it wishes to bring you back to your watery primordial origins.

Waves are accomplished sculptors, using the tool of water to shape stone and rock and boulders and cliffs. Waves are landscape designers. They have an unquenchable thirst for tinkering and rearranging. Sometimes after a storm, or if I’ve been away for too long, a familiar beach will have become someplace new. Hills and dips appear where there had been none. Rock formations will either become newly exposed or suddenly buried, with the level the beach either drastically higher or lower. Incoming creeks may take a completely new path back into the sea.

Waves are a full body experience. There is the exciting spectacle of watching an approaching swell, as it lifts upward, then curls and dives. Waves explode in the ears, crashing, splashing, roaring, pounding. We are invigorated by the ocean’s fresh fragrance and the thrill of cold water rushing over feet and ankles. The skin detects the moist breeze, delights in getting sprayed with tiny water droplets.

A wave is where water and land and sky meet and mingle. The unique character of each ocean wave determined by the particular clouds, wind and sunlight of that brief moment.

Actually, I am drawn to everything made of water. I love wateriness. Its slippery wetness, its many shifting colors, its transparency, its shape-shifting fluidity, its sparkle and reflectiveness, its gemlike droplets and bubbles, its ability to mirror anything near it. You’ll see water in many of my photos. In the form of rivers, streams, lakes, oceans, waterfalls, raindrops, puddles. And especially, in one of its most ethereal and beautiful forms, clouds.

I admit it. I confess. I am a cloudaholic . . .

Please do not use photographs without permission. To inquire about permission contact Carla at: brennan.carla@gmail.com.