9 May 2021
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.—Often when I write I feel like my byline, which pedestalizes only my name, is lying to you — and then lying at me when I go to look at it after I publish something. Yes there’s a fellow named Lucas Van Wyk Joel who wrote these letters, and it’s clear to anyone looking at me that it’s my fingers doing the typing, and that there’s nobody dictating at me. But there are other things stirring me, and, thus, stirring my fingers. It could be the warmth of the rooibos tea in my mug that conjures a thought that, while it feels like my own thought when it comes to me, verily has deeper roots than that.
I’m excited right now as I write. Instead of my cozy tea there’s the Pacific Ocean crashing some fifty feet in front of me. There’s the wind of the ocean, and there’s the California sun, shining a sterling silver light mixed with a dollop of honey gold. It’s a kind of sunlight I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world, and the light and the wind and ocean swirl together and charge me, and like happy electrons letters pop from my hand onto the page.
I cannot help but go and look at the plovers. Oh, the plovers! The ocean conducts them, just as the world conducts my hand. I smile as I watch how they hover as they run, their bodies still as their legs blur beneath. There’s something special that they want that seems to only be there when a wave retreats. The wave goes back and Bang! The plovers move as one after the wave like they’re an extension of the wave — they, like Aphrodite, come from its foam, and so appear to chase it when in fact they are it. They bend down and nibble at the sand for one holy second before the next galloping wave sends them shoreward as the wave’s vanguard. They do this against the scintillating reflections of sunset light.
My mind searches for a “why” for the plover behavior — maybe there’s some tidal organism that comes for air when the water goes out, and the plover knows this, and knowledge is the “wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” But answers to a “why,” though satisfying, raise only more “whys,” and I realize that the best part of all of it is there in front of me. It’s the plovers making me smile, and it’s my journaling conducted by the sterling and honey gold sunset light and the wind and the laughing ocean. 
