THE GREATNESS OF A BLUE PAINTED BEACH AND THE LOVE OF A LAKE

The power of a great lake: to soothe, to cause awesomeness, to tempt you to jump into it and splash around, to encircle your environment with its incredibleness, to let it help and heal you, to share the happiness of being in a lake with others so they feel its joyousness too.

To have a lake in your backyard, to see fish and polished stones by the billions, to step on and crack tiny seashells beneath your feet, to wear bathing suits covered with long white robes, to polish your body with sunscreen lotions and tanning oils, to meditate while sitting in the warmth and heatedness of the beige sands, to be in and with nature, to have it all around you, to be in a busy urban city but to have this rural natural spaciousness in its middle.

Day after day of wonderfulness in the summer months, surfing and swimming, dunking, diving, being driven in wave after wave of continuousness, a continuity of natural scenic beauty, beauty that others desire and even covet, to be within a few walking steps of a sandy beach right outside your front door, to have a beach in your neighborhood, to be a pirate always exposed to the greatness of the greenish blue seas. To be able everyday to imagine the great Splitting of the Seas as happened in the Great Exodus when the Jews were wandering to The Promised Land.

To feel life all around you, to feel it in the freshness of the smell as you sniff of the clean sea air, to feel it in the rushing of the coolness of blue waters as it bathes your body, to feel it in the sites of the vastness and the distance of the line of the horizon that extends over the great sea for miles and miles away.

To hear it and feel it as a sound of music as each wave pummels and plummets the grounds of granular sands like the snares on a drumhead moving around as they wisp back and forth, singing to you the songs of the holy weekday Siddur.

To always be able to go back to the same place, the same grounds of sands that are blowing though are unmoving, always to be there to enjoy this again and again, day after day, season after season, from sunrise to sunset.

A lake, a sea, you can call home, a place to receive love for you to give love, a place to be in the midst of naturalness, of beauty, living in a painting of a blue lake that is yours and that was painted by the greatest of all Creators, the greatest of all Artists, created by the holiness of G-d Himself.