I claimed the shores of Cannon Beach Oregon for myself when I was sixteen years old. It was still a secret then, a tiny jewel only just uncovered by knowing eyes. The waters dazzled that summer... washing along the shore and over my feet, casting a king's ransom in diamonds across my toes. I walked for miles along the smooth sand, gulping lungfulls of air tinted of woodsmoke and salt. I had never been to the ocean before.... and was naive to the strength of it's call.

Someone should have drawn me aside before I crested the dunes for the first time. Someone should have rushed a warning to my ear, quiet and discreet, that I would lose my heart were I to lay eyes upon that endless blue sea. Even a touch to my arm would have sufficed... to give me some sort of pause before I walked onto the windswept sand and laid my soul bare. But as it was, there was no caution. There were no defenses built to conceal me from that powerful beauty.

I stopped upon the grassy dune, engulfed all at once by the wind coming up from the waves. I never knew it was so far to the horizon. It was impossibly far to the end of the Earth, and yet I could lift my hand up and dance my fingers along it's edge. Seagulls pivoted in the wind before me. I stared straight ahead, and let my periphery gather the entire stretch of crashing waves. I wanted to swallow it all, to somehow collect it straight into my soul. Little did I know that I was the one being consumed and stolen away....as assuredly as an innocent aboard a black sailed ship.

I wanted to feel the Pacific's chill on my bare feet. The ocean lured me closer. Each wave rolling out into the next one coming in, like the tumble of a dancer's hands coaxing me closer... teasing me with a froth of seafoam. There were a million whispers in the crash of those waves, guiding me to the wet sand...promising me the treasures of decades, with just a glimpse of white cloud above the distant shoreline. They confessed there had been others before me at the water's edge. Others like me, held in a trance of mist and sunlight.... blue waves and hidden depths. There was no apology in the wind as it confirmed this with a caress to my cheek. There was only gentle guidance as it turned my attention... my very eyes... to the massive rock spires jutting up from the ocean floor. They stood sentry between the beach and deep waters, casting silhouettes across the tidepools. They were the witnesses to my seducing, these monoliths. So many secrets trapped deep in their core.

And there it began... this bittersweet ache within my heart. The wild beauty of the ocean always there, ready to lap at my ankles, or to sheild itself away behind a thick veil of storm. An unpredictable lover, holding the elements at bay one moment, then letting them sting in a howling gail the next. And I, ever small.... returning to those shores year after year. Too long gone from the water, and the ache grows deeper. The need to appease the ocean...and my soul. To reunite the senses with woodsmoke and salt air. Sand, and endless blue.

The monoliths remain, to collect their secrets and watch for my return.....
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A vision of that place...