I WENT TO OCEAN BEACH this morning to see and photograph the big surf that rolled in as a result of storms far out in the Pacific. ...I asked myself why we think of nature as female and the power of the sea as masculine...Mother Nature or Father Neptune?You may want to click on individual pictures to make them bigger.

YESTERDAY as I followed the steady stream of news reports from Haiti, devastated by the earthquake on Tuesday, I recalled something I had written a few years ago... went searching for it and found it in my journal for Tuesday, April 3, 1990. I had forgotten that I called the poem “Mother Nature...” Why do we say mother nature, I wonder; and why didn’t characterizing nature as female bother me when I wrote the poem? I’m going to give some thought to it... Anyway, here is the poem. You can see why it came to mind yesterday.

MOTHER NATURE

Some people say it isn’t a comfortable way to live,
but if you want to avoid being overwhelmed
by too much or too little of something
you didn’t ask for in the first place,
you’d better always be prepared for Mother Nature
to show up on your doorstep
with her bottomless bag of tricks
demanding to be let in.

There she stands one day when you least expect it
with mud, or is it blood, all over her boots
after having wiped out your cornfield
to say nothing of your herd of cows
that you haven’t paid for yet;
but what can you do
when, at best, you’re just a sharecropper anyway
hoping to make a buck off the land you lease from Her.

Just about the time you convince yourself
that there isn’t any way you can clean up the mess
She slips back into your yard if not your heart
with the sunniest day you’ve seen since November,
and you find yourself swearing
there isn’t anyplace in the universe
where life is better than here.


Tuesday, April 3, 1990To appreciate the wildness of the surf today, you should know that the platform of the Ocean Beach Pier is normally high above the water. Today the Pier was closed to people because waves were crashing across it.