And a bonnie Monday morning it is.  Crazy beautiful here.  Sunrise over the ocean out the front window.  Clouds that form, right before my eyes, born like a creature from a bit of sea mist that grows into a whale or a unicorn or, in the case of the one that just completed its finishing touches, a gigantic flying heron.  Their entire life span takes place out my front yard where I look out over the northern tip of the northern tip of Nova Scotia.  There is nothing but ocean out there.

And wind.

The wind is constant, less than yesterday but still enough to be part of the picture both in how it plays with the trees and the way it keeps the landscape moving and changing.  The sounds of the surf are more distant – the cliffs the house sits on are a good 50 feet high – but they make it clear that the ocean is real, that this is not a painting or a movie, and that anything I hear is not human born.  The inventions of man are not within earshot – no boats or cars or jet skis or ATV’s or radios or TV’s – though I can occasionally hear the strings from the window shades clatter against the wooden frames of the windows.  That and the refrigerator are it.    I breathe silently. 

Yesterday’s hike was kind of like the Grand Canyon only it was all green and blue and soft instead of red and brown and hard.  I spent the day awestruck.  The majesty of god’s creation was just as profound and our insignificance as a part of it was just as clear.  And I could not be more grateful to be a part of it.  We truly are nothing more than the little toad I almost stepped on or the moose leg bone I found except we are noisier and we spread out more.   And because of this we make more of a mess.  We can’t help it.

But also, because we are clever little nothings, I can travel to a place like this and set my legs to walking up over the hill and down the other side just to see what’s over there for myself and have tuna sandwiches and plums as a reward for having done so. I can see where I am on a map even though I am not on that map nor is the person who made it.  I can snuggle into the hillside as a shield from the wind and watch sea gulls fish and white caps do the Highland jig and I can see where the Cape St. Lawrence lighthouse used to be.  Other than rocks and grass and wild flowers the most prominent feature of the land is moose poop.  They must really like the view. 

I hope to see a moose while I’m here.

I also hope to get rested and calmed and smoothed out so that I make sense to me and then from there it seems as though the rest will fall into place.  A cinch, really.  Because here it all works together – clouds come and go, tides ebb and flow, wind blows, grass grows, mooses poop.  The days move along and nothing much happens and I can be here or not, that’s entirely up to me.