Storm clouds linger, playing hide and seek with the sun. The ocean rests, rolling and dimpled by an offshore breeze.

I have returned to the scene of the storm, the spot where I leaned weight into wind with the rain pelting my glasses. The spot where my imagination conjured a drowning man fallen overboard, boots filled and sinking to the bottom. Lost at sea, so close to home. It was a day when everything spiraled out from the center: wind, waves, and rain exploding like the universe born from a single big bang. A center that could no longer hold.

I walk from the parking lot with my spiral notebook and pen to jot down the kind of details my memory does not capture – the kind that draw a reader’s attention: the green and yellow bird laying dead on its side at the head of the trail, its feet curled tight, still clutching an invisible branch.

I make my way back to the fading path, step over the fallen tree and bend under the arching limb. This time when I reach the spot where the path gives way to open air, I notice another fallen tree grown into the ground, wrapped in vines adorned with red and yellow leaves: a place to sit.

Today the center is empty, gravity pulls from all directions, sky and ocean are still, a canvas waiting patiently. Explosion turned implosion. Warning reframed to invitation. Pushing flipped to pulling.  

I notice the fire burned scrub pine, its charred branches flat against the gray-blue sky. The beach below pocked with the footsteps of holiday weekend visitors now packed back into their cars heading across the bridge to wherever they call home.

A trail of rocks dragged up by the undertow snakes along the tide line. Clouds fill the middle of the sky with baby blue below and deep blue above.

Ankle high waves lap. Seals play, their slick black bodies undulating. The colliding turmoil gone, spun out to sea, the storm’s energy exhausted. 

A single boat makes its way South, too far to see clearly, but the white water breaking against the bow creates the illusion of a puffed cloud skimming the surface. A fisherman headed home? A local out for one more warm day on the ocean? Friends stretching the long weekend. Too far away to see. No matter, the illusion of a cloud skimming is more wonderful than the twisted and focused picture an intrusive lens would reveal. Truth is more than fact, deeper than detail, often beneath the surface, or behind the curtain, or hiding quietly at the back of the room hoping to be discovered.

The open ocean feels endless spilling over the horizon. More than anything it is quiet. The absence of the howling wind has left the beach feeling empty – like a single chair waiting and lit by the warm sun paned glass of an open window. 

The sun breaks through, stretching the shadow of the cliffs to the water’s edge. A darkened reflection of the stunted woods rooted in the cliff. So much changes with light. The soft-edged comfort of a shadowed world silhouetted, offering relief from light too bright, too direct, too revealing. 

A stranger enters the empty stage below, a camera slung over one shoulder, the extended lens tilting downward, a scope for shooting and capturing subjects from too far away to really understand. His hiking boots dig against the sand leaving deep rounded prints. He wears the clothes of someone who lives where the streets are sidewalked and lights dim the stars. He stops and turns to look at the ocean, camera hanging, then reaches for his pocket and presses a cell phone to his ear. 

I wonder who might be on the other end. What caller is important enough to interrupt everything. Whose call does he always answer?  Perhaps a partner inside somewhere reaching out with a reminder of something needed at the store, or just checking in, or maybe asking when he expects to return to wherever it is they live together. 

Connected to the voice at the other end, I can see his eyes look away from the ocean. His camera with its snapped images of the day waiting to be shared. Flat colored renderings of things, the spaces, the emptiness, the quiet invitation to sit – impossible to capture. The nothing resting before us defies framing.

So much quiet. Nothing moves across the stretched and frameless canvas of water, sand, and sky. No sound to hear; there is quiet for listening. No words to say; there is time to wonder. No thing to see; there is space to look. Everything resting and still in the wake of the storm, there is room to breathe. 

If only I could somehow capture this moment, secure it for another time, place it on a shelf somewhere within reach. Why is it that in turmoil we cannot lean in, inhabit the quiet center? How is it that our mind, the lens we use to interpret, cannot be adjusted to see beyond our immediate circumstances, to change the picture, alter the reality, capture what we need, and leave the rest outside our frame of reference?

I put down my pen, close my notebook and feel the sun at my back, the softened trunk of the fallen tree beneath me, and my feet rooting at the edge. What stretches before me is beyond anything I could imagine, beyond words, beyond pictures. Somehow the storm has left a space in its wake, a gap between things that pulls at me like a window lifted, welcoming fresh air into a room left closed for too long.

I stand and walk back up the path. Closed notebook and pocketed pen, I too, become part of the quiet. Enveloped by thoughts of a life shared with the one whose call I always answer.