Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have almost always been near a beach – where the water meets the land, where the wind blows across water and sand, where your toes are caressed by thousands of years of erosion.

So many people I know go there too late for my taste, when there are large crowds at the beach that clamor for attention. It was only in two places where I found like minds early in the morning – Hawai’i and, oddly enough, New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Oddly enough, they were decades older than I, finding peace from troubled lives with the casual everyday sunrise.

The light plays across the waves as the sun makes it’s way across the horizon; the refractive indices of the clouds casts different colors across the water, reflected, bouncing, even as some is blocked. Some silently cheer for the sun; I cheer for the clouds, the unspoken heroes of a sunrise that make it different every day.

I make time to change band-aids on my soul during troubling times and air out the wounds during the good times, knee-deep in water, physically feeling the ebb and flow of a universe that greets like a puppy, playful, and yet like the wolf, serious at a moment’s notice.

Deadly and playful, as the world is.