watching the pelicans

I spent this week watching pelicans swoop at waves that bumped all day into an island off southwest Florida. Watching the pelicans, I lost track of time. I mean of all time.

The artifice of the chair beneath me, the resorts behind me, the conversations around me faded and I slipped into a prehistoric moment.

The sand was there. The tides and the cry of the gulls were there. I felt the brush of wind. I noticed the various bodied bipeds, feathered and unfeathered alike, that lull and stroll and look about on the beach. I was present to the presence of each of these things that could have been there on that beach, and were in one form or another, any time during the evolution that shaped that particular moment.

The unhurried pace of vacation, and the sight of pelicans flying around like baby pterodactyls, helped to prompt my observation of such timeless serenity. But that thing is here as well.

Back home at my desk in the basement, tapping back in to the rhythms of work and responsibilities of day-to-day life, even here I bear witness to this moment as it unfolds, and to the next. We live as witnesses to a steady crash of moments. We are part of eternity lost in the elemental persistence of presence, the stubbornness of now.