Revelation at Randall's Bay

It is a cold day for Christmas, even in Tasmania.
It has rained most of the night but just after dawn
the clouds break and tell me that now is the time
to take my dog for a run without being drenched.
So into the car and we head for Randall’s Bay.
I don’t know why I like this beach so much.
It is much further to travel than Verona Sands.

But the long sweep of sand at Randall’s Bay
says “welcome” and it feels like coming home.
Garden Island and the headland offer shelter,
the shallow slope of the beach and bright water
provide calm, protected and friendly bathing.
It seems that here is safety, here is tranquillity,
here is a place for family and for love.

Despite the shelter, beyond the island,
beyond the headland is the Great Southern Ocean
with its salt and turbulence and violent vastness,
the end-of-the-earth repository of all the oceans,
all the waters which run in the world and in
the veins of passionate seafarers.
There is connection here to all the earth.

Today Randall’s Bay is a picture of tumult.
The usually pristine sand is strewn with kelp
and other debris of a storm-tossed night at sea.
Turning my face toward the turbulent sea
I am captivated by the curve of the breakers,
so uncharacteristic in this bay of tranquillity.
I scan and point and focus and am overwhelmed.

My camera falls loose around my neck.
There is no lens which could ever capture this,
It is something that only the heart can see.
The swelling silver ocean comes rolling, rolling, rolling,
Relentlessly, poundingly, gently, folding itself into itself,
Then tenderly, reverently genuflecting, to the shore
saluting the land with a thousand sparkling kisses.

At the water’s edge those sacred kisses soak my shoes
and freeze my feet while the Antarctic wind
sends tiny biting hailstones to cut and caress my face.
The piercing cold shrinks my head and swells my heart
And for the second time in my life I know that
Everything is lost, and everything is gained.
That there is no beginning, there is no end.

Love and loss, life and death are not opposites
They are the ether of seeing blindness, of blinding vision
to be found only at the outer edges of existence where the
swelling, surrendering, silver breakers of the heart
come relentlessly, poundingly, rolling, rolling, rolling,
To gently, fiercely, savagely, divine the body of the world,
the very self, into sacred, unifying, manifold authenticity.