......................................................................................................................................................... On the beach at Carpinteria, sandpipers run along the sea's ragged edge on thin legs moving in a blur. Gulls and egrets confer. A Great Blue Heron stands still, alert. What is it thinking that I can't imagine? From seaweed twisted like Medusa's hair, sand fleas rise as a cloud, then disappear again into the slimy snags—the air clean and saline. "The word sal in alchemical texts, especially since Paracelsus, often indicates the stable basis of life, its earth, ground, body." [J. Hillman, "The Suffering of Salt." Alchemical Psychology. Putnam, CT, 2010.] Sweet scent of cooking fires from hundreds of RVs, each with it's own signature: "Stealth," "Sprinter," "Searcher,"owned by similar clad people—short pants and short-sleeved shirts— sitting at collapsible tables drinking their morning brew. "Goin' Places With Smilin' Faces." Steep wooden steps remind me of climbing up from the beach at Provincetown; the Bluffs return to me the mesa of Bolinas. Every place is the last place, and the last place is no place at all. "Each time breath draws through me, I know it's older than I am." [M. Cuddihy. From, "The Body"] I enter the shadows of a copse. On the trunk of an ancient tree runes and graffiti sit side by side. Then turn to see the islands of Chumash origin tales, faintly visible today. Graffiti on the side of the railroad bridge, painted by shamans hovering in the air, painted over, All those joyous inscriptions gone (except in my camera). Will we ever learn to live with the animate and inanimate, the seen and unseen? Or are we doomed to the specters of politics, religion, and the canons of philosophy?