Meditating at Gun Landing Cove, April 9, 2022

(Louisbourg Lighthouse Trail)

I sit here and I cross my legs,

I rest my hands on my thighs. 

I settle, and let the walking energy come to be sitting energy.

And I listen.

The sea air

The salt of it all

Waves - the crash, then the recede, the return

The rolling forward like a pin on dough, then the flowing back again, in force

It goes - Flow, drip drip drip back, FLOW forward again

(Repeat)

Repeat, repeat, repeat - oh how it has repeated, for millennia

There is a rumble deep in the bowels of the rocks as the waves wash over them

The black and white terns jostle about out past the big rock - seed stitches on embroidery cloth

There is something so beautiful, so unrecreateable and huge and wide, about the movement, about the way the waves move.

If we ever cannot be in nature, how will we recreate this? 

If it is too hot, or too smoky, how will we be?

When we cannot sit and listen to the ocean.

The waves move and the shore moves with them:

Fog fades back and then mists forward again - middle of the day, a magic trick! Where is cloud, what is mist? 

You must guess, beguiled.

How many photos have been taken of this place? these rocks, these water droplets, this sky?

So the taker doesn’t forget.

Hundreds and hundreds

And by necessity, slightly different each time - and never quite capturing 

The feeling of being here

And the same with me, as I let the god of the place talk to me

Through his rocks, through her waves, through their terns and fog

And I scribble with one finger in my notes app, the modern notebook folded in a poet’s pocket

To try not to forget. I don’t want to forget– 

I cannot forget – 

the feeling of being here. 

This poem appeared in 'Magine: Unama'ki / Cape Breton's Literary Magazine in Summer 2022.