I come to Fox Island to meditate, to reflect as I gaze across the water. The hypnotic sound and motion of sea and wind, crashing wave and crying gull become a lyric in the song of the universe.
The earthly presence of the granite beneath me, the salt air and the pungent odor of decaying sea-wrack give way to the ethereality of thought and I wander among the swirling conversation of fifty-thousand years of human consciousness.

Distant, the cool wind whispers for attention as it lifts goosebumps along my arms. One moment I remark the lobster boat chugging past and the next I have crossed the threshold of the subconscious that is called lost-in-thought by some, daydreaming by others, out-to-lunch by the unimaginative. I am free of gravity and my mind, loosed from its temporal bonds, weightless.

Unguided, the primal inhabitant of my intellect steps out and journeys through the immeasurable reaches of my mind among those places where consanguineal connections remain, where tucked away are hopes and dreams, remnants of my dim and distant  ancestors from the dawning of intelligence at some point lost to time.

I am they.

They reach to me as I gaze, softly breathing, at the vanishing point of awareness, the same as that part of me that reaches back hundreds of generations. In the marrow of my bones I feel a tug as from a familial thread connecting me to a past that calls for me to remember. Briefly our conversations mingle before light separates me from the dark that birthed me.

The moon kisses Fox Island twice a day breathing life into her then sucking it away with equal romance. Fox Island is fixed to Earth, immovable, yet twice daily ceases to exist although its ancient granite bones never disappear and seagulls are free to drop mussels upon those bones to loosen the nourishing morsels trapped within. When the island breathes again the granite bones haven’t changed perceptibly and the seagulls carry on as they always have unaware of the miracle below them.

The wind nudges me, or was it the echo of my people? I stir, remembering.