I Walked the Beach Today

I walked the beach today.

I got back to Texas late last night after a week home in Maryland.

After a few hours briefing to get an update on where we are on the production system for the shrimp operation I suddenly realized I needed a different perspective.

After a week of hospital rooms and doctors visits then straight back into work mode I felt I was losing my perspective. Actually I felt I was losing my hold on what is real.

So I took a long, long, walk, almost 2 hours.

It was about 73 degrees cloudy and windy.

I loved the smell of salt and sand. 

Walking the beach brought back a lot of contradictory feelings.

The waves coming in, as they always do, gave me the feeling of endlessness. I guess this is as close as I will ever get to conceptualizing eternity.

The surf beating against the shore, the vastness of the Gulf as you look out over an indistinct horizon, made me feel (as it always does) insignificant. But, I finally, for the first time in my life, I was OK with it.

For me, the ocean evokes the vastness of creation, but the sublimity of that realization is tempered by the comfort of my self awareness.

I was captivated by the bounty and diversity of the sea birds. Plovers, gulls, pelicans, pipers, and more caught up in their lives and struggles and the joy of their own existence.

I was once again humbled by the richness and complexity of life on this earth. 

And for the millionth time I felt a flash of anger at the insensitivity and lack of empathy by the majority of humans who simply are too stupid or too cruel to recognize the value of life other than their own. Who do not see that those individuals who represent other species value their lives and their existence as deeply and intensely was we do our own.

I no longer believe or hope that people will change. I now simply hope that when that moment comes for each individual to know their time is over on this earth they have an epiphany of compassion and experience a painful moment of awareness followed by anguish and remorse for their cruelty.

But as I walked the beach I could not even sustain that negative feeling.

The ocean does heal.

I guess that is why I want to get Lori here again.

In the next few days we will know what current treatment options through several different clinical trials will offer the best choice to battle Lori's cancer. 

We may end up at NIH, or at a Dallas hospital, or even back at Georgetown Hospital depending on what the next battery of MRI's and CT's show.  

What we do know is she has a new lesion in her brain that is in a very dangerous location. 

We need a carrier mechanism that can get an effective chemo through the blood brain membrane and that will shrink the lesion. 

Failing that we need to take the lesion out stereo-tactically. 

Then we have to find a chemo that has some chance of stopping this demon from returning.

Lori is in good spirits, eating, driving, and enjoying life.

She is truly, (no cliche), my hero. 

We have made a very serious offer for a permanent site to expand our production capability for the shrimp farm. We should hear something in the next ten days. We are cautiously optimistic but we have two back up sites on stand by should this opportunity not materialize.  

I think 2013 will be the break out year for the company. 

A dear friend sent me this quote form Winston Churchill last week. 

Those of you that read this blog regularly know Churchill is one of my heroes. 

I was not familiar with this quote before. I will keep it in my repertoire from here on.

 "Success is not final
   Failure is not fatal
   It is the courage to continue
   That counts"

How true is that ?