My husband and I are leaving for Florida today.  He has a meeting and I will have all the mornings he is in class to write–no laundry, no housework, no work, few if any phone calls.  We will even be “child”-less these four days as our sons have obligations here at home.  Not that they are very demanding any more; the last time they went on vacation with us they slept every day until noon, so I still spent those morning hours happily alternating my attention between the computer screen and the beauty outside our villa.

This trip we are staying in a hotel where our room is supposed to have a lovely balcony with a sea view.  I love the ocean.  I am not a sunworshipper in the conventional sense–I do not lay on the beach baking myself to a delicious, golden brown–but I do honor it for the lifegiver that it is, and marvel that something so functional is also so very beautiful.  I digress, back to the sea–I am a child of the green hills of the Appalachian Mountains and foothills where I have spent my entire life; that is where my heart truly lies.  But there is nothing I have ever seen to rival the sheer power and majesty of the ocean.  It is simultaneously comforting and frightening.  It makes me feel small and child-like, and at the same time vulnerable and insect-like.  With the sun, it is the original life-giver, and it can take that life away as easily as it gave it.  It loves us and nurtures us, and at the same time convicts us for our arrogance.  I love the ocean.

I am excited beyond words to be going back.  There is no other place that so inspires me as the sea.