Most mornings these days I am wandering on the beach by about 5.30am. It is for me a sacred ritual of waking and entering the new day. The alarm goes off; I tumble out of bed, boil the water for coffee, have a hot shower and then drive the half mile to Farnborough beach.

By the time I park the car I am almost awake and anticipating the first cool crumbling touch of the sand against my bare feet. At this time of the day there are quite a few people about, most of them striding purposely along the waters edge, feet shod in well-sprung runners, arms swinging, some even with Sony-walkmens’ attached to their ears drowning out the cry of gulls and the gentle susurration of the slate blue sea.

I prefer to flaneur, letting my bare feet carry me where they will across the cool sands. If I locked up my feet in runners, I’m pretty sure they’d rebel, detach themselves from my ankles and run off like mad dogs into the dunes!.

As I wandered along this morning, breathing in the cool air, the sun just rising out of the sea, lines from a Mary Oliver poem drifted through my mind – ‘and have you ever felt for anything / such wild love - / do you think there is anywhere, in any language, / a word billowing enough / for the pleasure / that fills you, / as the sun / reaches out, / as it warms you / as you stand there, / empty-handed’.

I gazed left out to sea, to the great glorious blue vastness, to the sun, ‘like a red flower / streaming upward on its heavenly oils,’ and then I looked right and beheld the hills of Yeppoon, expensive new houses littering the cleared slopes. I thought about the weekend’s election result, about alarming mortgages and the threat of rising interest rates and then I recalled the last lines of Mary’s poem, The Sun – ‘or have you too / turned from this world - / or have you too / gone crazy / for power, / for things? - Matthew Quaife-Ryan, CQU Chaplain, ph 07 4930 9285 or via chaplain@cqu.edu.au.