More robots at Illustration Friday.
Illustration Friday: Spotted
On the granite coast, I kneel down to see layers of round shapes in a tidal pool: the glistening curve of blue beach glass, ground shell, bits of marl, littoral litter. It is the texture of a cold and unhemmed coastline, a study in extremes.
Here, you have to hold on to your life. You have to blend in to avoid being hunted, unbruised by the pounding waves, while managing to stay wet in the face of sun and wind, maintaining your heritage by staying pretty in order to attract the opposite sex. Your existence is hinged on the passage of time, good genes and pure luck: will you survive until high tide?
This little intertidal oasis, paradoxically gorgeous, has a rainbow of life crawling within it: red, brown and green tranlsucences, bumpy lumberers, glittering gems, but it is growing stagnant by the minute. At noon, the water is warming up under the intense sun; in fact, it’s so sensuous to lie in the small ripples at the rim of the pool that you can hardly tell, with eyes closed, where the water ends and the balmy air begins. Then a breeze reminds you, as a shadow sheds some cool on your skin.
The estuary beyond the dunes, nursery for marine life, reminds me less of motherhood than these beautifully unprotected cavities. Here, time is compressed. Weeks become seconds. With little time to think, intuition develops. I slowly begin to trust my intuition as it gains conviction, but the experience that feeds it is time that’s lost: will I still be here by high tide?
Little Theories
Ford was his usual, curious self today, with the questions about Black Holes, wormholes and portals, wanting me to read A Brief History of Time to him so that we could dissect current knowledge together over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And then he sat still for a moment at lunch to ask the question,
“Mommy, does the sun love me?”
“Of course it does,” I replied cautiously, “Does the sun follow you around all day?”
“Yes.”
“And does the sun go to sleep with you at night?”
“Yes.”
I thought about this all day. How he takes apart our concept of the universe into fragments and puts the pieces back together (Big Bang theory, bits and pieces scattered, cooled, then formed planets; the sun is a dying star, etc) and reviews it out load (he did this with the digestive system to his pediatrician at his second annual checkup). I thought about the frequency of questions, these days, that I am unable to immediately answer. I thought about how uncomfortable I feel, anthropomorphizing the sun. I took a deep breath and started to paint. In a few minutes I felt much better.
As I pulled out of the parking lot tonight, I noticed the moon on the hill, squinting through the atmosphere in a sleepy haze. As I kept driving, damned if it didn’t surprise me in the way it followed me home. There was nothing usual about it. The sky was the color of the asphalt under my high-beams. Nobody else was on the road. The air, balmy and warm, smelled metallic and a light southeast breeze blew into the car at the stoplight. Winding my way home through the hills, the moon swung playfully left, and then right. It followed me out of my car and down the driveway and up to the stoop, before hiding behind the junipers. It tucked itself in, an hour ahead of the rain that followed. And then, Ford’s naive question made perfect sense.