Hi Friend,
I’ve been bookmarking my days with a dip in the ocean early in the morning and yet another at sunset, regardless of the weather. Every day seems to be such an adventure when it comes to observing the subtleties of the landscape, including, of course, the widely diverse colors and moods of the ocean.
The beach this morning was covered with thousands of the most beautiful creatures. At first I thought they were jellyfish, but I was soon find out that they are called By-The-Wind Sailors (Velella velella). If you’ve never seen one, picture a deep blue oval disc, maybe the size of a silver dollar, with a thin translucent fin arching diagonally across its back like a miniature sail. They’re actually colonial organisms — each one a tiny community of individual animals working together, drifting the open ocean for what could be years before the wind and waves deposit them on a beach like ours.
There’s something quietly powerful about syncing yourself to natures rhythm instead of the one your phone is pushing at you. My early morning dip meets me when me nervous system is still soft and impressionable, before the noise of the day has had a chance to harden around. The sunset dip closes the loop — a kind of biological punctuation mark that tells your body, at a cellular level, that this particular chapter is shifted.
My wish for you is that you two can find this in your life.
ox Dennis
p.s. More on these incredible creatures can be found here:
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/marine/colonial-creatures/wind-sailor
