On a recent morning walk, as I took in the sights and smells of the woods, I was reminded of the woods near my home when I was a kid, and how important a role all the woods since then have played in my life.  There's something about the woods, here in California or there and then in New Jersey, that simultaneously settles me down and excites me.  Inspiration in the play of light; reassurance in the vivid complexity of every branch and leaf.  So much has gone before me in the woods.  All of life.  Centuries.  Millennia.  And walking through that now taunts me with the mystery of my connection to it.  An unspoken meaning surely treads beside me, beyond my ability to fully comprehend or express it.  Which is the draw to the woods, still, and its power.  The joy is experience, not explanation, in that silent search. 

Summer nights.

I watched these boys play with the sunset in the tide pools as Galway Bay heaved sleepily around them, settling in for the long, quiet, black night... the Bay, not the boys... and I was reminded of how my brothers and I played similar end-of-the-day games a thousand years ago on the opposite side of the Atlantic at the Jersey shore.  It was the same salt air, and it was turning suddenly and surprisingly cool, as it had back then when it tightened our skin with every drop in degree.  Those were the days.  I have to remember to remember them.  If it takes coming to Ireland to do that, than so be it.