Story Fix, Jelly Fish, & Eagle Eye

Beseeching the network of bent sun rays in the shallow baywater for writing inspiration again today, I found it, and something else.

First, the sticking place in the 8th draft of the 1st chapter got unstuck, as if by flash of insight from the white hot intersections of light.

Else, hundreds of transparent organisms appeared in the water that could likely be identified by experienced seafarers, not me. For lack of a better guess, they looked like baby jellyfish, the size of a half-dollar, the color of wet tissue paper. They changed shape in slow amebic-like patterns. The first two on which I hard-focused, for they were camouflaged at casual glance, were shaped like butterflies, with a definite interior vein-like structure. Their shapes changed as I watched---sometimes into a stubby tube with one end closed, the other open like tulip petals. Then the petals opened and split into two halves, now like the roots of a giant tooth, until the roots curled together like pinchers, then into a round flat disc, to an oval leaf, to a big coffee bean, now a tiny mexican hat or candle on a round plate, now an asymmetrical UFO, now Saturn with ring, now a symmetrical snow angel, now a butterfly again. They were all moving against the direction of the ripples. Baby jellyfish, just hatched, headed toward open sea?

Came another gift. Yesterday's eagle returned to the same branch for a longer visit today. It screeched like a rusty gate when it landed, not a pleasant creak---a herky jerky one. Binoculars revealed a downy tuft of white feathers barely attached through the dark breast feathers, floating with the eagle's movements. Most certainly a young eagle, still losing its downy feathers, already quite large. Maybe its voice is not yet fully developed? Its eagle eye was frightening in the binoculars. I wiggled my foot, attracted its attention, then feared for my life in the long moments before it flew away over the bay with a rattly whir. dkm

Pinpoints of Light

On a solitary writing retreat far from home: It's shocking what little I know about all things ocean or bay, born and reared, as I was, in the middle of Kansas. I had few childhood experiences of watching or noticing the natural phenomena of large bodies of water. When a child sees new things she accepts them as they are, each one another thing to learn about the world of new things to learn---one more memory to add to her growing cache. To attend the same phenomena as an adult, without the backdrop of childhood exposure, is to be visited with an edge of exhilaration that may not have happened in childhood. With gratitude for this, I sit on "the dock of the bay" and pay close attention.

This morning the water of the bay, just two feet deep, and crystal clear under the fishing dock where I sit, ripples and laps around the dock and against the rocks, bending the sun's rays, causing them to show up on the sandy bottom as an undulating net of lines and strings. The effect is to make the bottom appear covered with large flat rocks edged with thin bright-orange rings of light. Where the strings intersect, an intense sparkle reflects back up through the water, each one a spot of hot white light among a million such spots, burning into my aging memory cache. I hope these spots translate into writing inspiration later today. dkm