It was a summer evening, just at sunset. I found myself lying on the sun-warmed sand, soaking in the last warmth of the day thinking exactly nothing with the Little Dipper anchored nearby, when I witnessed something extraordinary.
In a slight breeze, the waves were rising as the sun was falling. Soon there came a fleeting moment of perfect alignment — the low sun hit the heart of the rising waves until each one became shot through with sunlight, light-tipped and golden.
“Flashes and specks,” that is what poet Walt Whitman called them - these little things almost too fast to see, or too small, too subtle to notice, at least at first. The silver ripples on the undersides of the leaves when the wind blows, the endless commas beneath the beach grass when it swirls on the sand, the flicker of gold in the waves on certain beaches just at sunset.
To truly know the story of a place you must get beyond the cover art and double-paged spread, coffee table book view of things, and look for details.
I want to be obssessed with the details. If I spent enough time and listened with my whole being could I learn to hear the difference in the sound of a snowflake hitting a pine bough and an oak limb? Could I distinguish the taste of summer’s languid lake water from the cold sips of spring? Would it be possible to know the bird by the brushing sounds of its wings passing overhead in the complete darkness?
And, so what if I could? What richness is there in these flashes and specks? What beauty in a bird’s wings? What meaning in the glimmer of gold in an evening wave?
They are not the whole story certainly, but stories are built of sentences, and sentences are made of words and words of letters - small things, true but without them, there is no story. If we can “see the world in a grain of sand” as Blake said, why not worlds within the waves?
Before I could think any of this, the sun sank too low and the light went out. The waves were just waves again, the sand just sand. Or was it?
I pulled anchor, spun the bow, and started off for home, constellations of sand grains on my bare feet and worlds of waves everywhere I looked.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)
This is just lovely Jeff ... unique and the work of a true poet. And the photo is indescribably amazing! thank you. ~Jude Gx