In front of me, there are small sea birds with straw-shaped beaks that they jab into the sand, breakfasting along the water’s edge. The patch of tidal sand forms a triangle into the bay and at its point furthest from land is a large rock with a gray lump atop it, a pelican. While I watch, she rises up and stretches her wings, letting the air comb her feathers before curling back up, tucking her wings back into her breast. Her movement sends the small birds atwitter and they flock closer with a burst of vocalizing and sand poking.

A cloud of termites hatches out of the sand behind me ands swirls around me like winged snow, hitting my face and neck. As I sit writing, there are three hatchings, three clouds of termites setting off toward the south. The layers of bird calls are their sound track to new life.

Behind me men with crowbars are deconstructing the roof of a modest beach house to add another story, transforming it into another type of dwelling as they have done to several nearby houses.

Across the water, Bay Farm Island sits with its modern construction mc mansions, over which airplanes from the Oakland airport fly at ascending angles. Further still are Twin Peaks and San Francisco’s downtown in layer upon layer of so much beauty it physically hurts.

I breathe it in and am filled with yearning, to be one with it, expanding to be all of this and nothing, no thing and every thing and at long last enough.