Walking

My son is with us in the woods.  He has moved himself off the mokupuni o Hawaii (left Hawaii) and is transitioning.  He and I went into town and shared a plate of buttermilk pancakes and conversation, and before heading back to the woods I cruised the street overlooking Saratoga Pass and saw the extremely low tide.  "Walk?"  Yes, he was agreeable to a walk. 

The beach walk along the Langley shore is one of my favorite places to connect with the moment.  Spring has definitely come to Whidbey Island though the cool breeze is still lean in temperature the blue sky and promise of more sun warms me.  The silty shore flowed to a substantial skirt owing in large part I think, to the clay banks crumbling from the seeping fresh water above.  Huge caves are carving hollows at the base of the Langley village above.  We walked north after climbing down the barnacle encrusted cement steps leading to the beach.  The feathered clans were every where, crows, gulls and a solitary Blue Heron all at work finding things to eat.  Anchored just past the skirt of silt and sand was a boat with motored sounds coming from it.  From our initial perspective long blue hoses hung over the rail and into the hands of three people on the sandy spit.  It didn't take much to realize we were watching commercial clammers.  But what we both were seeing was something new to us.  When my son was a boy we lived now far from this Saratoga Pass beach, where we had a life very much involved with what goes on with Washington maritime life.  We shoveled uncountable holes over twenty plus years seeking out the bivalves that would feed us in chowders.  The enterprise was manual and it mattered that we covered up the holes when we were pau, and only took what we would eat.  Commerical clamming? 
The hoses were like an extreme power washing that blew the clams out of the holes and harvested as a result.  We didn't stay long enough to see whether they covered up the holes after. 

Walk, chat, silence.  Walk, chat, silence.  Time was spent in this simple and appreciative form of being together and nourishing.  Noticing life being lived by barnacles, mussels my son and I speculated on what we saw and made connections with our own lives.  Stepping on the irregular surfaces of rocky shore and mudflats my body exerted energy and moved the stale pockets of mana left from the long sedentary winter.  Transitions are like that:  irregular yet somehow expectantly familiar as one moves from that place over there, to the next space between, on the way to a new here.