As I walk along the beach at the Point Reyes National Seashore, a head pops out of the ocean. Fifty feet away, a harbor seal – an adolescent male – watches me from just beyond the swell. By the time I pull out my binoculars, he’s gone.
 
This beach has been part of my life for 32 years. The adjoining campground, Coast, is the first place I ever camped overnight. The fallow deer and raccoons that awakened me that long ago weekend are here still, two or three generations removed from the fauna that inhabited this lush seashore when I was a teen. Even then, in 1975, one or two  seals always appeared when I found a spot on the beach. They’d emerge from the surf and study me, seeming to wonder what I’d do next—or why I was doing anything at all.
 
In my life away from Point Reyes, I’ve watched plenty of kids grow up, and
plenty of people grow old. Some of the creatures I’ve known for years – my godson, my goddaughters, my co-workers and friends – didn’t even exist when I first walked down this beach. My brother Jordan, on the other hand—as well as well my father, and my grandparents —were alive back then. I remember writing my brother and telling him  about waking up in the middle of the night, and seeing a stark white deer standing right outside my tent, framed by the horns of Cassiopeia. Jordan’s gone now; so are many of my dear friends, claimed by accidents or disease.
 
The bluffs and rocks and cliffs of this beach have aged and crumbled during
those years as well, shaped by wind and erosion and tremors. Point Reyes is a lively place, where the ragged edges of the North American and Pacific plates scrape and shift in a perpetual renewal of the planet’s crust.

 But though I love this seashore—and have marked its changes—I don’t measure time on a geologic scale. I do that by the people who’ve come and gone in my life, during those 32 years of beach fires, day hikes, and bobcat- sightings.
 
The  seal surfaces again, keeping pace with my stroll along the shore. Quicker with my binoculars, I see his face. The pinniped seems genuinely curious. “Do I know you?” I call out, because alone on the beach we often speak without expecting an answer. “Did I know your father? Your uncle? Have we met before?”
 
He disappears, exquisitely adapted to water that has already numbed my feet.
I didn’t recognize him, of course. But it’s not unreasonable to think that,
when I first visited this coastline in 1975, one of his kin watched me
spread my blanket and open my book, just as I’ll do today. For all I know,
the seals themselves have kept track of me, as well: that tall guy with thin
legs, who used to have dark hair.
 
Each life on this planet is a continual coming-of-age, performed with a cast
of characters engaged in similar activity. We grow up with everyone, and everything, around us. For that reason I’m willing to consider these seals, and bobcats, and pelicans, and elk, part of my circle of friends (or at least my network of acquaintances). Even a fleeting moment of non-verbal contact with a  seal feels strangely comforting – like spying a former classmate, or their daughter, from atop a Ferris wheel at a crowded fair.

They may not see you wave, but it doesn’t matter. The sentiment is what counts. We’re still around, you and I. The world’s still spinning. I wish you well.

  In memory of Jordan M Greenwald, who would have turned 50 on June 6th. Written at the Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes, California, on the beach and in my writing cabin. My gratitude to the Common Counsel Foundation for the opportunity to spend two weeks at this extraordinary retreat.

God, that is. We had a very interesting conversation. Where? Where else but the Black Rock desert, where the Divine Essence and I enjoyed a rambling, 10-minute chat on Friday morning. Not metaphysically, but in a phone booth (while Superman waited patiently outside).

I asked if She’d read “The End of Faith,”an enormously provocative and important book by Sam Harris. Indeed She had. (Interestingly, the woman who spoke to God before me described Him as a man.) “The problem isn’t faith,” She said, “but organized religion.” When I wondered why there wasn’t more divine intervention, given the current state of affairs, She replied by answering that age-old question: Yes, we do have free will, and no, there isn’t much She can do about the little foibles, the microcosmic inanities, of creation.

So what of the Bible? The Old Testament is the source of much of the modern world’s conflict and turmoil, and I wanted to know once and for all whether or not it was, in fact, God’s word. When I asked that final question, She laughed with dry amusement: “Come on," She insisted. "I’m a much better writer than that.”

And speaking of free will,
one of the most outrageous examples of national hysteria in memory unfolded on August 12th, at a JetBlue boarding gate in New York. Raed Jarrar, an architect of Iraqi descent on his way to California, was forced to remove a black T-shirt inscribed with an anti-war slogan — “We Will Not Be Silent” — in Arabic and English. The phrase, ironically, is borrowed from the White Rose group, formed in Munich in 1941. White Rose members believed that the young people of Germany had the potential to overthrow Adolf Hitler and the Nazi government. How’s that for irony?

As fate would have it, I’m scheduled to fly to JFK on JetBlue next month. In a perfect world, every freedom-loving passenger traveling on that airline would pull a Spartacus move, and show up wearing the very same T-shirt. Can you imagine? Two hundred JetBlue passengers, all wearing shirts saying "We Will Not Be Silent" in Arabic and English. Imagine the open mouths of the baggage checkers; the consternation of the ticket-takers; the giddy pride of belonging to a nation of people with the courage to stand up for the First Amendment.

Oh, for a perfect world.