A Pause: At the Beautiful Oregon Coast

            When we think we’ve done grand things, when we think our lives are important, when we feel ourselves powerful and mighty, we need to sit by the ocean for a while and feel ourselves in our place. 

The gray-green water stretching to the horizon (and, we know, even beyond) casts a spell of infinity, as do the ceaselessly pounding, splashing, foaming waves, barely audible to the one small woman on a bench on a cliff so far above the ocean.

            Earlier I had slip-slid down a long, steep, deeply sandy bank to a pocket beach bound on both ends by impassable mounds of rocks. From one end of the beach to the other, stacked against the uphill cliff, stretched a wide swath of tangled, sun-bleached driftwood (and I remembered all the downed trees on the ski trails this winter). 

The surf surged onto the beach, dragging loose rocks back with it, creating one of the most beautiful sounds in the world: the gurgling laughter of small rocks as the ocean pulls them into its depths only to have them dash back up on the beach with the next incoming wave so they can be pulled into the water again, like children who run again and again from the bottom of the slide to its steps just so they can have the joy of sliding down again, chattering and laughing, chuckling and giggling.

            In case one reasserts one’s sense of importance upon leaving the coast, a hike through the redwoods will once again bring one down to size. The redwood trees, centuries and even millennia old, just magnificently are. Their beingness dominates, their cynn, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon concept of the way of being that each individual inherits according to the kind of thing (the species) to which it is born. The Anglo-Saxon poet-monk would rhapsodize about the powerful feorh, or spirit, of the redwoods. Walking among them, even one small twenty-first-century woman feels that feorh, and words like “cathedral,” “divinity,” “sacred” rise in her mind. Her feorh instinctively adjusts to that of the trees. The age of an individual tree staggers the imagination; its height goes beyond sight, its girth beyond comprehension. There may be small creatures here, too – bugs and worms, rhododendrons and red sorrel – but only dinosaurs could compete for space and attention among the coastal redwoods. The redwoods carry with grace the distinction, of which they do not deign to be proud, of being the tallest trees in the world. They simply speak for existence, theirs, yours, mine – that of all of us who gratefully share the space of this earth with them.