You can hear the ocean
early in the morning from here,
this house hunkered on the hill,
the back side of Soledad Mountain.
Mexico is way out there and
the lights of downtown muted
by salt air rising from Mission Bay.
This should feel like home.
The sun changes everything
as it scales the mountains,
spills down canyons,
and sets the clouds afire.
I watch the burn.
Traffic noise rises and
defeats the ocean as it will
again this time tomorrow.
My heart is steady.
There is comfort in birthing a day, but
internal combustion is loud,
as is making light and heating homes.
We drive through our days, never
considering how deafness burgeons.
We are too many and we miss hearing home,
the blood and ocean in our ears.
(ocean: curiositiesbydickens.com; Mission Bay: panaramo.com)
Narble Furt Lives 
This is Beautiful…love the imagery 🙂
🙂 It’s been a lovely morning.
You make me miss the West Coast. MTM and I talk often about living there for a while. I’ve seen a lot of the world, and there’s nothing like that fragile shelf you describe.
I’ve lived on the West Coast since I was sixteen. We moved from the New England coast. I’m pretty locked in to the Pacific side. I’ve been fortunate enough to become familiar with the whole North American Pacific coast. It’s home. I’ve fallen in love with the miles and miles of beach in Oregon…with very few people on them. It’s not uncommon to spend a whole day on seventeen miles of beach on Oregon’s North Coast and only encounter a handful of humans.
When we get our house built next year you and MTM should come visit. You could probably walk in Merry’s footsteps.
It takes standing by the ocean, watching the birthing of the day, breathing the salt air, and feeling the spray of the waves to remind us that this is our mother that we crawled out of, forsaking our gills to walk the earth.
Yes. We still have a lot in common with fish. It’s not obvious to a casual observer, but it’s there in amazing detail.