Reflections on the Ocean

I was walking on the beach tonight in a mood as dark as the sky.

I was in a fit. I was angry, and was daring the waves that were rolling in around my feet to push me farther into my tirade. I was venting my words of frustration into the wind when I suddenly noticed a strange orange glow just above the horizon over the ocean.

I stopped and stared.

The sun had already set behind me in the west, but here it was, as if a fire were burning miles out at sea. What was going on? Could it be a ship - a tanker - afire on the water? What kind of disaster was taking place?

I kept watching. The glow got brighter.

Slowly, a shape began to appear. An arc, a crescent, grew out of the glow. It started to look like another sun rising from behind a cloud, chasing the one that had set in the west just an hour before.

But it wasn't the sun, and it wasn't a fire. It was the moon. An angry, orange, fiery moon, burning its way out of the mists and clouds over the Atlantic.

The moon. The same moon that I had seen the night before as a bright orb high over the water, casting a silver light that extended from the distant surface of the ocean all the way to the beach. The light from that moon had been reflected brilliantly from the crests of the waves that were pushing towards the beach.

It was the same moon that I had seen years before over the same ocean, in the middle of the night, from the deck of ship hundreds of miles out at sea.

The same moon, over the same ocean, that had been seen by countless sailors over the centuries.

Slowly, as the moon rose higher, the orange glow faded to the calmer, cooler silver of the night before. My mood softened. My anger faded like the mists that had fallen away from the face of the rising moon. What had seemed so sharply frustrating only minutes before now melted away into insignificance like my footprints in the surf-washed sand.