I went down to the coast at an hour nobody sensible should be awake and spent about twenty minutes not doing anything in particular. It was the best twenty minutes I’d had in a week.

The stills capture some of it, but what I kept coming back to was the rhythm — wave, pause, hiss, wave — and stills don’t have that. So I took ten seconds of video on a tripod and clipped it. This is not cinematography. It is a single, uncut wide shot. Look at it for ten seconds and then come back.

That’s all. I don’t have a lesson or an insight. Sometimes a coast is a coast and that’s enough.

A note on the clip: it’s deliberately tiny, under 1 MB, because your browser should not have to download a megabyte of ocean just to read a blog post. If the loop doesn’t autoplay (some phone browsers refuse), tap play. The audio is muted by default, on purpose. There is no dialogue. It’s just water.

Low waves, pale morning light, foam running back down a shallow beach
The light was doing that thing it only does at 6:40 AM in June.
A gull mid-turn over the surf
I owe this gull at least half of the post.
Kelp washed up on sand, very green against the grey wet sand
The kelp color is not adjusted. It really was that green.
Far shot of the cliffs, mist rolling in from the left