Praia da Luz (oceanic amazment and bumming about our culture)

Beach of the light. Today is grey, cool, windy. For two days last week (Tuesday and Wednesday I think) there were 30-40 MPH winds from the ESE which was really riling up the waves, and I only just realized how much the surf changed the profile of the beach. I´d been thinking that I was looking out at the beacj just at high tide, when the rocks are the part that´s most exposed and the sand is underwater, but this morning walking out the beach I realized that about half of the area that used to be sandy (maybe a half mile of beach? or less?) is now bare of sand and just rocks! I walked farther than I intended to because I was seeing this reddish color - what is that? seaweed? - and when I got there, it was about 3 or 4 feet of red bedrock newly exposed. The rocks where there used to be sand are boulders, some quite square, fallen from the cliffs above, some rounded and weathered, ranging in all sizes from an armload kind of size to a pebble. Wha-what?! It´s so different! I built two cairns that looked satisfyingly unlikely, on the edge of impossibly tall, in honor of the power of the ocean to change and shift and shape shift and remain the same... So I guess those rocks were there under the sand the whole time, and now I wonder where the sand went... Will it wash up in Maine? Is the whole beach area more shallow than it used to be? Will more sand fill up between the rocks again with the gentle surf washing it in?

Walking back to come to this cafe here, I walked through a pile of trash left in the sand by yesterday´s sunbathers. Why do people leave their discarded junk on the beach?! Are they too lazy to walk the 100 yards to the trash can? Do they not see any difference between leaving it there and putting it in the bin? I walked past it, annoyed at them, and then annoyed at myself for not picking it up, so I went back and collected it all; as long as we´re stupidly throwing our resources into coke cans, ice cream dishes, take out tins and single use ketchup packets, why not at least collect the evidence of our stupidity in one place and put it out of sight? Throw that shit AWAY, where ever that is. Sometimes I get a very visceral feeling of the proximity of the edge of the cliff that our culture is blindly racing towards. Good luck everyone, do the most you can. Isn´t it obvious that we´ve made some choices with negative impacts on the rest of life, and we need to STOP and change direction? Mid-course correction? It can´t be that hard. Anyway, thanks yall, for doing whatever it is that you do, cause I believe you´re all doing your part, and whatever it is that helps bring a little order to the mad chaos of the era we live in is most appreciated. By me and the rest of life.