Exercise 1: Sound

The beach washes against the edges of my hearing. It seeps and creeps and comes-and-goes into the tiny bones in the centre of each ear and its washing changes sound at its source so that the whoosh of each passing car is a wave. I do not think of it. I move and stop and move and drag back and my breathing is the sea that moves in and out. I am as regular as the waves and as uncertain.

There is no hush at the beach, no sanctuary of light held silent. Birds cry and call and swoop and the wind moves over the drums in my ears and my heart is a drum that beats sound into feeling beats sound into sensation beats sound into pulse. And the sound of feet moving on sand is not no sound but subtle, shifting sound, the sound of air as it moves. Disturbed, seaweed crunches like paper dry and discarded.

Foot prints the path to the rocks in the centre where wind and water wrap around the ears and rush their way into the blood. Water pounds - erratic. One wave sighs, another crashes and startles.

Pulse shapes the slow silent flow at the heart of the one who is still at the heart of the beach.