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I went to church today for the first time in too long a while.  My church is never indoors.  Today it was a beach with waves breaking upon it.  Clouds overhead shimmered in the sinking sunlight - herringbone, mare's tails, ragged contrails smudged by smoke from distant fires.  Porter, Nico, Jose and Anna Carla played with a football in the avenue of sand between the dune grasses and the crashing water.  Thousands of monarch butterflies fluttered in the wind, hewing to this coastline of goldenrod and dune rose on their impossible migration toward Mexico.

I was immersed in patterns.  The ripples colliding in pools spilt into by the waves; the sloshing of the eternal ocean; the sinking sun; the summoning of the butterflies southwards.

There was a channel in the sand where water returned to the surf, and I digged in that - sculpting the ripples and currents into new forms - however brief and ephemeral they might be - until another churning wave erased my interferences.

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