The day after

It’s a normal day at the ocean today but for some reason a lot of plastics washed up on the shore today.

I’m still recovering from my sickness. I’m itching to do some relief work. I feel so sorry for all my fellow Filipinos whose homes are inundated by the floods from the two typhoons this past week. 

Quiel was quite intense here too- but mostly wind. Aside from a few broken windows (the locks broke during the typhoon) and a wind-withered garden, nothing much else happened. I was surprised we didn’t lose any trees.  Lucky we hardly got any rain on this side. It would have been devastating if we had equally strong wind and rain. 

The ocean was surprisingly reserved in the wind. By the late afternoon everything had calmed down. The beach was sculpted anew, and quite clean.

Yesterday morning I got up quite early. The Kingfishers are always noisy at 5 am, and it was no different. They were announcing  a fairly clear day ahead and were obviously pleased to be alive. It seemed so still and peaceful. There were onshore and offshore breezes blowing steadily. Everything was bright and clean- except for the fence, which was gray with all the sand blown on it from the day before. The migrating birds were busy trying to make up for the lost time. 

There were so many different types of birds – big, small, dark and white, all flying south. The bigger birds seemed to have a harder time flying against the wind because they have to fly higher. The smaller birds stayed as close as they could to the ocean, dipping low with the trough of the waves and flying right over the white wash and spray. The determination of birds is quite admirable. 

As the sun started coming out the blue-gray horizon and the ocean’s hues were accentuated. The first kilometer or so was brown because of the water coming in from the rivers. Further out, different shades of aqua, dark green, and blue green, dotted with disappearing and reappearing white peaks from the wind. 

The beauty of nature is amazing, awe inspiring. But once we start messing around with nature, we feel her wrath. 

Hello

A tree frog in a banyan grove...

Typhoon Pedring just hit us. Luckily it wasn't as bad as we expected it to be. Nothing more than a few branches broken for us. I feel really bad for the farmers who lost their crops though.

 The power of nature is awe inspiring. I spent a few hours on the beach yesterday (a safe distance from the waves) just feeling so alive, watching the waves smashing, crashing, booming on the beach, and feeling the wind ripping through. 

Lucky for us the only thing we had to rescue was our volleyball net on the beach when the water started to come in closer:

A few minutes later this is what it looked like:

Needless to say, within a few hours, the whole beach had a different look. And it's looking great for the pawikan. For the past few weeks the beach has been littered with sticks and some logs brought by the sea after the last typhoon. We cleaned off the plastics etc but there's been way too much sticks and logs to pick up all at once. The sea buried the sticks below several feet of sand yesterday, so it's all good. The sand dunes are looking much better and the contours are much better for pawikan to crawl on.

Nature's got her act together. We humans just seem to have a knack of messing with her stringent laws with the foolish and selfish intentions. It's time to start thinking twice where we're heading if we keep living the way we are today.