Some two thousand five hundred miles from the coast of California, a "hot spot" in the floor of the Pacific ocean has jetted matter from the heart of earth toward the sky. It passes through cooling waters, and becomes a cone that, over the millennia, breaks the waves and rises thousands of feet above the surface. Unstable, it erupts, explodes, sloughs new earth down the slopes to consolidate, hissing in the sea.

Thousands of years pass, and the movement of the Earth's plates carries the hot spot along to the east, and a string of black pearls forms, the newest surely hidden from our sight, some thousands of years away from the sky. 

At the water's edge, I sat in meditation as I have in so many places of the earth. The grass was grass, and the sand was sand, all part of this world's creation, and so familiar. Yet at the same time, when you come into stillness, the subtle voice of the land can be heard.

I sit on a shard of land, some of the newest land on the planet, a pinprick in the seamless, seemingly infinite fabric of the Pacific Ocean. the air which arrives here has seen ocean for days. The water has seen no human for weeks. The islanders knew they lived in a place of water spirits.

There is a crust of modernity, the the red crust of a scab, like a wound which won't quite heal, that has been overlaid and which spreads across the intricate design of the "natural" islands. We have won a battle again uncertainty by simplifying our environment, so we roll our pavements and raise our towers and create a sameness which will not challenge our hegemony.

Yes, I live in it, and at present I depend upon it, more so than most people in the world, who live closer to the land and what it gives and what it takes away. It is easy to feel loss when you are comfortable — perhaps that is the only opportunity, in fact.

Still, the voice has a place. And the tamed islands are much less vital than the wild ones, the ones which could still teach us something.

I sit on this Earth, two thousand five hundred miles from our continent, feel the subtle voice of this newest of lands, and the connection to all lands and all things, undeniable, beneath the waves.