Some of these beach haiku were written by random trips to beach.
Most of these are part of a series based on afternoons spent at the beach on Hilton Head Island with my pad out ( a real paper note pad), hoping for words with my iPhone camera handy to add illustration to my thoughts.
I wanted to see if I would be ‘inspired’ by what I saw, by what I heard, by what I smelled, by what I tasted, what I felt emotionally and what I felt tactilely.
Some turned out okay.
Some were too forced.
Some were just bad.
Some did involve some or all of those feelings.
As far as it goes, I guess I was inspired by by what I saw, by what I heard, by what I smelled, by what I tasted, what I felt emotionally and what I felt tactilely.
Please aware that most of these haiku were NOT WRITTEN on the date in the title – for an explanation of this please see The Series link in the navigation table.
present hard enough to deal with – couldn’t handle notion of future
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort. The more central struggle in life was between water and beer. Too much beer, he knew from many years of experience, tended to be hard on the system.
Once again another quote from The Brown Dog Novellas by Jim Harrison, New York, Grove Press, 2013.
The Brown Dog Novellas is an anthology that contains all five of the Brown Dog stories and as those read this will be aware, it is the book I am listening to as I drive to work.
Since the first thing I do once I get to work, after I make sure my computer and all the other tech stuff I need for day is up and running, is to think about writing this.
Mr. Harrison’s words are fresh on my mind.
I am in an office on the knife edge of America.
A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean.
As Mr. Thoreau said I have the rest of the country behind me.
A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean and sitting at my desk, looking at a computer screen, I could be anywhere else in the world.
And the words of Mr. Harrison are fresh on my mind.
I read all the Brown Dog stories when they were first published and I must have read then all dozens of times.
It was reading the first Brown Dog in Woman Lit by Fireflies and the passage where Brown Dog is driving the ice truck down the hill in Grand Marais, aiming to make it into Lake Superior, that I knew Mr. Harrison and I would be get along.
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort.
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time is a quote somehow connected to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson but I have not been able to trace this to an actual citation.
There is a ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ quality to both statements.
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future.
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
I guess it is good to remember that there is no place like home.
Words I have never heard of but that I see in action almost everyday since moving to the coastal empire of the low country of South Carolina.
I live about as close to the seashore as one can live without being wealthy beyond my dreams.
I live in a coastal enviroment.
I live where where the majority of the birds that I see every day are known as sea birds.
According to wikipedia, There exists no single definition of which groups, families and species are seabirds, and most definitions are in some way arbitrary. Elizabeth Shreiber and Joanna Burger, two seabird scientists, said, “The one common characteristic that all seabirds share is that they feed in saltwater; but, as seems to be true with any statement in biology, some do not.
Seabirds have had to, over time, adapt to living by the sea or living by saltwater.
Again according to Wikipedia, one of the things that set sea birds apart from other birds is that they have salt glands that are used by seabirds to deal with the salt they ingest by drinking and feeding (particularly on crustaceans), and to help them osmoregulate. The excretions from these glands (which are positioned in the head of the birds, emerging from the nasal cavity) are almost pure sodium chloride.
I was looking up sea birds the other day as I had just snapped a picture of a sanderling or a plover to send to my sister.
I was mentioning to my sister how the different sea birds that feed along the wave line have beaks of different lengths so that as good things for sea birds to eat are at different depths in the sand, many different sea birds can feed along the same stretch of beach.
Just one of those cool little factoids of nature to keep in your back pocket when walking along the wave line with friends and you want to show some smart.
While reading about sea birds in Wikipedia, I read that just quoted passage and hit that word, osmoregulate.
I love words like that that I never came across before.
I also love any word that spell check tosses out which tells me the computers haven’t seen the word either.
I had to look it up.
Again according to Wikipedia, “Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content; that is, it maintains the fluid balance and the concentration of electrolytes (salts in solution which in this case is represented by body fluid) to keep the body fluids from becoming too diluted or concentrated. Osmotic pressure is a measure of the tendency of water to move into one solution from another by osmosis. The higher the osmotic pressure of a solution, the more water tends to move into it. Pressure must be exerted on the hypertonic side of a selectively permeable membrane to prevent diffusion of water by osmosis from the side containing pure water.”
Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content.
Simple enough, right?
I mean it means just what is says.
Osmoregulation is the active regulation of the osmotic pressure of an organism’s body fluids, detected by osmoreceptors, to maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s water content.
It takes the salt out.
Oh.
Simple right?
I enjoy reading books about walking the Appalachian Trail.
I come away with two thoughts.
These people are cool.
These people are also nuts.
But I read the books any way and often look up all the cool equipment they mention.
One of the many pieces of cool equipment mentioned are portable water filters.
It came to me that if one of these filters could filter seawater and remove the salt, they would be perfect for the beach.
I looked up the most recommended filtering product.
It was a series of bottles connected with a hand pump.
Fill up one bottle with water from your local backwoods, high in the Blue Ridge Mountain spring.
Pump the water through the filter to the other bottle and bango-presto all the impurities and chemicals and bugs and amoebas and other nasties that cause all sorts of problems you don’t want to deal with while walking the Appalachian Trail are removed and the water is safe to drink.
I contacted the company to asked if their system could filter saltwater?
Had I known, I would have asked if their system could osmoregulate water.
The company was quick to respond.
They told me their product COULD NOT remove salt from seawater.
They also had to point out that ANYONE who came up with such a filter would be a BILLIONAIRE.
Well, boy howdy but that shut me up.
But now I think, sea birds can do it.
Osmoregulation.
What’s the big deal?
Like those different lengths of beaks, sometimes you just have to take the back seat and the same time, take your hat half to nature.
immanence of ghosts foam’s oblivion whitening under crumbling coasts
From the poem, Ultimatum, published in Vigils by Siegfried Sassoon, 1935, LONDON, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD.
Something we cannot see, something we may not reach, Something beyond clairvoyant vision of the years Our senses, winged with spirit, wordlessly beseech. Meanwhile rife rumourings of the earth are in our ears, — The lonely beat of blood, the immanence of ghosts, And foam’s oblivion whitening under crumbling coasts.
I watched the sunrise this morning.
I watched the sunrise this morning with my morning coffee in my hand and my morning reading in my lap.
I watched the sunrise this morning looking out my window over the roof of the building next door.
I watched the sunrise this morning but I never saw the sun.
The sky above the building next door was black, full dark black, then first light black, then dark gray, then gray, then silver gray, then silver then the lightest light blue as the particles in the atmosphere began to pick to the presence of the ocean about a mile away from me but miles away from the sky.
To the sky, the ocean is almost just rumourings of the earth
Those particles in the atmosphere are something we cannot see, something we may not reach.
I understand or at least, accept the physics of what is happening here.
The colors are there.
Not just in our senses … or are they?
That ocean reflects its color into the sky while the foam’s oblivion whitening under crumbling coasts.
I watched the sunrise this morning and never saw the sun.
there was light good light but what I consider dawn … darker than all that
How Dark the Beginning
All we ever talk of is light— let there be light, there was light then, good light—but what I consider dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day receding and what we recognize as morning, the sun cresting like a wave that won’t break over us—as if light were protective, as if no hearts were flayed, no bodies broken on a day like today. In any film, the sunrise tells us everything will be all right. Danger wouldn’t dare show up now, dragging its shadow across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf of the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.
… by Maggie Smith.
According to Wikipedia, Maggie Smith is an American poet, freelance writer, and editor who lives in Bexley, Ohio.
Wikipedia also mentions that, In January 2022, when the board of trustees of McMinn County Schools in Tennessee, in a 10-0 decision, removed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus from its curriculum for 8th grade English classes, overriding a State curriculum decision, Smith was critical of the decision. She tweeted: “We’ve lost our damn minds if we think that to keep kids safe in school, we need to ban books, not assault weapons”.
answers on the beach to any question and tide brings new answers twice daily
I really do believe that the answer to every question you might ever have can be found in the sand at the beach.
When you understand that the tide comes in twice each day and wipes out all the old answers and provides a beach full of new answers, the wonderfullness of this arrangement of answer management becomes even more wonderful.
I am happy to take advantage of this phenomena.
I walk the beach when ever I can, looking for answers.
I walk at lunch time at work.
“Going out for answers, anybody need any?”, I yell as I walk out of the room.
They are all there, the answers, just waiting for you.
But there is one caution.
Do you remember the old movie, No Time for Sergeants with Andy Griffith?
That scene when Mr. Griffith makes all the toilets seats stand up and salute?
That scene almost killed my Dad with a heart attack he laughed so hard.
The thing was that my Dad almost had a heart attack EVERY time he watched this scene.
Maybe knowing it was coming made it even funnier?
In the movie, Mr. Griffith and his Sergeant go over ALL THE ANSWERS to the all the tests Mr. Griffith has to take and PASS, to get classified.
When asked how did on the tests, Mr. Griffith replies, “you spent so much time drumming the answers into me …we ought to have spent a little more on the questions they joint up with.“
All the answers are there on the beach.
You have to bring your own questions that those answers joint up with.
