Signal to Noise

Caught the low tide at 11th St. today and was reminded of why I got into this stuff in the beginning.

That place where yesterday and tomorrow melt away; leaving just sensory experience. A breeze on the cheek, rock under feet, the singing of the waves reaching shore, the smell of the ocean.

Science has been a great way to stay close to it, and also, oddly, a distraction from it.

A handful of times I have tried to describe it to students, but of course, the words always fall short. It’s a feeling that some of us have experienced and very few can put into words.

“…a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”
John Steinbeck, The Log From the Sea of Cortez

It seems ever-more-difficult to find the signal through the noise, but the transmission is still being sent, and if I take the time to tune in I can still hear it.