As I walked back to my campsite, I tried to talk myself into going. I was only one hour behind schedule. For a few isolated moments, I thought I might try. But I didn’t. Instead, I packed my few remaining possessions, and with a heavy heart, pushed my kayak into the ocean. I was depressed. My body felt tired, and my spirit weak, and that I had failed at something that I really wanted to do. Or so I thought.

I slowly retraced my path of yesterday, up and around the small point, beaching at a sandy cove, where I spent the next forty minutes walking, looking for glass balls, wondering why I didn’t go? I stopped again at a rocky beach, just south of Burdwood Bay and walked. Bottles, plastic, Styrofoam fishnet floats, jetsam of our disposable society. But no glass ball.

I made my way around another point, and once again stopped at a beach, to explore the old cabin I had seen the day before. Oil drums, tattered blue tarps, plastic, garbage, and a sense of decay and hopelessness. And walking amongst the ruins of the cabin I could feel the decay of a society focused on a battle against these wild places.

A battle of desperation, anger and fear. A fear of what we don’t understand, a fear of what lives in the dark, when we turn out the lights of civilization. I didn’t go back to the big beach where I was the last time. Instead I found a smaller beach. Protected. I found the perfect nook, in the trees, to put up my tarp, and tent. I built a small fire. I took off all of my clothes and sat in the elusive sun. It felt good on my skin. Warming. Safe.

I set up the rest of my camp and then crawled into my sleeping bag and began to read. And as I read, I began to cry. I don’t know why I cried, but I cried soul-wrenching sobs that blinded my eyes with tears. I cried so hard my stomach hurt, and it was difficult to breath. I cried for release, but it didn’t come, and then I slept. When I awoke, I realized that the ocean and the wind had given me this day to continue my journey.

A man, a kayak, a time schedule, twenty miles in six hours, and I will be there. And I would have, yet I wouldn’t. I would have been pushing by the surface, rushing, focused, busy. I was ready for this journey physically, but inside as to who I am, I wasn’t ready at all. Refection, thought. Light captured in a broken shard of glass, lying on the beach. Illumination. Awareness. It is the life journeys that are the most difficult