Perhaps it was the Maine coast, so in and out with its coves and points and small sand beaches. Perhaps the tradition that has evolved over the past -ye gods- is it ten years? My daughter is 25, and I'm sure we were first here more than ten years ago when my sister decided to rent a house for a week in York in June - before the season jumps the rate. She found this one the second year and has returned to it ever since. I come when I can. Two years of Gilbert & Sullivan rehearsals shortened stays. Work. Other things. But at least two days would be here. This year I returned from Colorado and spent the whole week. The charm of the five-minute walk to the sandy beach--small, not crowded--with a penchant for casting up sand dollars for the seeker of treasures. My sister is such a seeker. This year there have not been sand dollars except for a few. She's collected plenty in the past and ruefully acknowledged that she doesn't really need more. She brought the beach home one year--sand from an unnamed shore, assorted dregs of sea life--and, in a huge glass bowl of a terrarium, created a vignette of the beach, sculptured dunes and all. The slopes of sand held by their own innate tension against the tug of gravity. I've made baby ones in little glass bowls and even moved them to Colorado. They remind me of the ebb and flow of beginnings--and endings.

Somewhere recently I had read a tiny summary of Beachcombing at Miramar by Richard Bode (Warner Books, Inc. 1996), so when I saw it on the bookstore's shelf, I pulled it off and handed it to my sister. She thought it looked interesting enough to buy, and I read it the same afternoon. He's good--Richard Bode, the author. Its subtitle, "The Quest for an Authentic Life" is perhaps the more telling. The quest for authentic living is moving into the limelight more and more these days. Some people do it without even thinking, but more are like the couple who live across the street from Bode, who engage in cross-purposes, intently not listening to each other. Not listening with the heart, that is.

Bode gradually fills in the how of how he came to Miramar to live in a house on the beach and do nothing more than walk the beaches--observing, collecting, experiencing, thinking. He assesses the shades of loneliness and solitude and likes his solitude--up to a point. He does feel a need for the companionship of a fellow traveler of equal heart and soul, and fortunately, by the end of the book he has met her.

He admires the artists Georgia O'Keefe, who was fully authentic and did not put on a face for or about her art, and Paul Gauguin. He delves into Gauguin's life in detail: the leaving of family in Europe to paint--and love--in Tahiti and the honesty it took to do that. Bode's life has also been one of breaking away--breaking out of--discovering self, but he also conveys a large sense of responsibility for the people in his life. In a hotshot NYC firm set to make lots of money, he realized it meant selling his soul. He chose not to. Then he became a free lance writer, apparently a good one, to support his wife and four children. But he also could see that his marriage lacked... and he writes that when the children were grown and on their own, he packed it in. That's when he came to Miramar. To beachcomb his life and scavenge for his soul's food--seeking wholeness and authentic being.

His thoughts range to Galileo, to Ptolemy, to Shaw, to Shakespeare's Polonius--"To thine own self be true...." He remembers being asked by a friend who had survived a heart attack, what did he think about death...and being unable to answer. At Miramar he reaches an answer:

I would tell him that it is the constant awareness of death that gives meaning to life. The moment we lose the sense of our own mortality, we succumb to a different kind of death, a death in life, which is a death far worse than the one we fear.

After the week in Maine, my sister and I moved on to Vermont for several days to stay with a dear friend of mine. I gave her a copy of the book, and when she was done, one of the passages that she felt echoed a strong truth was the one I had been looking for to refer to in this column.

Bode writes that one thing that he can admit to himself, there at Miramar, is that he's confused; he doesn't know all the answers.

In the past, I viewed this lack of certainty in myself as a sign of weakness. I yearned for an absolute truth, an ideology, something would cover every contingency in my life, tell me what to think and how to behave. Searching, I read great poets and philosophers--La-tzu, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Whitman, Shaw. I gathered them in with all their inconsistencies, paradoxes, and disharmonies. I discovered that each had a piece of the truth for me, and that in moments of need I could pick and choose....Now I see that to be confused is to be strong. Confusion forces me to assess my situation, to move with care, to evaluate my progress and correct my course as I go along. There is no dogma, no ideology, no absolute truth for me to fall back on....it set me free to explore the world and find out for myself what I believe.

Then he talks about "dogma sickness." What a great phrase! It so aptly describes in a nutshell the condition of people who have a need to rely on some one or some thing to order and regulate their lives. Who believe that they "know" the truth, and that we others who don't "know" their truth are but poor weak slobs existing out here in the darkness.

There are many wonderful passages in this little book. I found myself reading out loud to my sister here and there--yet not wanting to read it all aloud so that she, too, would enjoy the first read. And yet, not wanting really to stop.

I close with this thought of his as he meanders along the sand finding limpet and snail:

It occurs to me that I could string my shells together into a wampum necklace and offer it as legal tender to purchase this strip of land, this stretch of beach, this Miramar! And then I realize that it isn't necessary for me to barter for what I want, because, by the immutable laws of nature, it is already mine.

Heed the winds and the waters and the lights of sun and moon Be here now

Cherie Staples Skyearth1@aol.com