Cape Disappointment Lighthouse – Field Note
I come around the bend and there it is—the lighthouse, clinging to the cliff as if carved from the rock itself. The midday sun is high and merciless, bleaching the headland into hard whites and deep shadows.
Below me the Pacific hurls itself at the rocks, wave after wave, each one rising with fury and collapsing into a roar that shakes my chest. Spray bursts upward, then slides back into the tide, ribbons of foam unraveling into the sea.
I stand still, caught between the steadiness of the lighthouse and the wild rhythm of the water. Power and grace. Violence and release. And yet it’s not the force of a single wave that alters the cliff, but the endless returning, the quiet insistence that wears stone into shape.
I watch, humbled. Change, it seems, is less a sudden storm than a slow, devoted tide—an unseen hand carving us toward what we’re meant to become.