Chance = Change

Carmel Beach at Sunset

            I see a stretch of water in front of me, and a wide sky meeting it, forming an horizon, and all obstacles in my life disappear:  I feel myself suddenly in unobstructed flight, to dream and do, limitlessly.  As long as I can remember, this has been my deepest reaction to being beside large bodies of water: freedom from limits.  I become the water, am part of the sky, an animal floating between both. I am a creature painted by Chagall.

            And the canvas I am stretched on holds all the magical colors: the crisp white beige of the sparkling sands, the deep green-yellow of the washed-ashore seaweed, the sliver glints sparkling on the tips of the waves, the purple/turquoise/deep blue/aquamarine water itself, the white clouds, the yellow gold rays of sun, and all the dots of red/pink/blue/lime/peach/brown/orange  of the people and dogs walking by me: all small dabs of shiny oil  that make up the entire perfect picture.  It all looks like so much art to me.

            There are people who feel this way when they are in the mountains, and others who feel most free in cities ringed by tall buildings they feel they have to climb.  Yet others find unlimited creativity in the small cubicle they’re assigned on a job, and there are ever those who are able to find freedom in a jail cell.  Buddhist sages speak of finding the limitless freedom of enlightenment within one’s own consciousness, and there’ve been plenty of ancient Buddhist saints who’ve lived alone in freezing mountain caves to prove it.  One of the great appeals of falling in love is that feeling of limitless joy and power experienced in the first part of that falling: thousands of songs have been written about it. 

            But give me the Ocean, the beach and the wide sky every time. And give me time to sit on that beach, breathing it all in, and you’ll find me a happy, calm and everything-is-possible woman.  A shack on the beach would serve as well as a mansion. All I really require is the vast water and sky, and the luxury of time to be near both.  All I need to feel strong again is a one-on-one with water and sky.

            So, a weekend in Carmel is exactly right for me.  A week would be better, and a month, the best of all.  But for now, I’ll settle on the glories of this weekend, and count myself lucky that I now live near enough to it to come every weekend if I want to.  For now that we have made San Francisco our home, I am nearer to my idea of Heaven than I ever have been.

And I wallow in the realization that , even at my age – not a youngster anymore – I had the strength and courage to make this happen, to make the difficult move out of a well-rehearsed NYC way of life, to leap off the cliff and trust that I would not fall, but, rather, fly straight to the places I have always dreamed of being: my almost Heaven, my picture postcard , this place called Carmel-By-The-Sea.