On The Beach

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Cycles, huge cycles.

All around me monstrous movements were taking place. The very land beneath my body was shifting. The continents drifted like barges on the plastic mantle: carried by enormous plates that plunged above or beneath each other. There, in the direction of the sunset, under that calm ocean, the Pacific plate plunged under the North American plate . . . heaving up the coastal ranges in the process. Horrendous stresses were generated, stresses that must be released in the form of earthquakes. We lived on top of a system of coiled springs. They could go off at any time, shaking cities to pieces. This grinding, crushing motion of plate against plate would tear off Baja California along with the city of Los Angeles and transport it northward until the site of L.A. would be level with that of San Francisco and located on an island in the Pacific.

When?

In about ten million years.

In ten million years what will be left of Los Angeles? Or of San Francisco? Or of Homo sapiens?

Could a species so volatile, disharmonious, and paranoid possibly endure for ten million years? Or one million? Or ten thousand? Or one thousand?

Alone on the beach at night I find a new time scale. My little life becomes as brief as the flash of a meteor across the sky. And yet, if I like to think so, this scene is all for me. Only I-with my human-brain-can take in its significance, can realize that the planet Venus hanging above the ocean is a world as big as the earth . . . is shrouded in carbon dioxide . . . and has a surface as hot as molten lead. Only I can know, as the big moon rises, that not so long ago men stood on its surface and left footprints in its dust. Only I can tell that this massive continent was once part of Pangea, the supercontinent that broke up 200 million years ago. All this I know because I am part of a superbrain, the collective brain of humanity. No other creature has such a collective brain. The birds roosting on the rocks, the fish in the ocean, the plants and insects, the sheep on the hills: They do not even know their own histories, let alone the history of the planet.

The moon, low in the sky, appeared to be enormous. It illuminated the beach, the sparse willows along the creek, the lapping waves, the huge expanse of ocean. A night bird called. Some bleating sounds came from the sheep in the hills. From the direction of Route 1 came the sound of a logging truck changing gear.

I walked back from the beach to my tent and crawled inside. From there I could go where I wished, leaving my body, traveling in spirit. My teacher in the spirit realm was called Fong. He was a Taoist hermit, or had been when alive. Fong had told me the secret of Tao, of balancing the yin and the yang. That was the essence of the balanced way, which avoided extremes. Too much yin and one became slothful and self-indulgent. Too much yang and one became tense and ambitious. A Taoist hermit goes with the flow. He Is like the fog that rolls in from the ocean. The fog enshrouds and envelops the redwood trees, but it does not distort them. It touches everything, but leaves everything unchanged.

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