All This, All at Once

There’s a seagull staring at me like I’m the one out of place. Maybe I am. I’m on Cannon Beach—famous for that jut of volcanic defiance known as Haystack Rock—watching the tide slip in and out like it has better places to be. The Pacific Ocean heaves beside me, ancient and indifferent. A single figure walks the shoreline, as if they, too, were dropped here by accident.

And that’s the thing: we’re all here. The bird, the person, the rock, me—each of us some improbable cluster of molecules convening on this exact stretch of sand at this exact moment in geologic time. It shouldn’t happen. It’s almost rude how miraculous it is.

This beach is 20 million years old. Haystack Rock was formed by lava that didn’t bother asking permission from the Pacific Plate before pouring down from the Columbia River Basalt Group. The ocean is roughly 3.8 billion years into its side gig as Earth’s mood ring. And the gull? I’m pretty sure it wants my sandwich.

It’s not lost on me—this coming together of timelines and storylines. That person walking by might be nursing heartbreak, or indigestion. Or maybe they’re just thinking about what to make for dinner, unaware they’re part of a cosmic Venn diagram that includes a prehistoric monolith, a bird with attitude, and someone standing in the sand trying to make sense of it all.

But I’m just here, half-wondering if the seagull thinks I’m a god. After all, I’m upright, I have snacks, and I seem confident. That’s a working definition of divinity in a lot of systems.

So we stand—bird, rock, ocean, human—each of us living our respective truths, each of us doing our part in the baffling theater of “now.” And I guess that’s what I want to say: if you ever forget how strange and beautiful it is just to exist, go stand on a beach, stare down a gull, and remember that you're standing on molten stone shaped by a billion-year-old tide while breathing air filtered by millennia of algae and arguing with yourself about what to eat later.

All of this, together, right now. What a ridiculous, wonderful miracle.