Thanksgiving afternoon at the Oregon coast.  A break in the storms, and people walking along the beach, getting out for air, conversation, to enjoy the beauty of the shore.  How can I best capture this?  The more I looked at this picture, the more I found myself trying to figure it out.

Lost in conversations, are they aware of the incredible beauty around them?  They come to a place of sublime natural grace and power, but they are engaged in mundane trivia, trapped in the mundane petty details of their lives, seemingly unaware of their surroundings as they walk through the details of a life lived elsewhere.

Or have I got it wrong?  The natural world, for all its drama, has nothing on the sublime grace and power of of man, and the rocks of nature pale to grayness in comparison to the actual lives of the living, breathing humans.  Shakespeare reminds us, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!”

In the end I chose this version, and title it “Edge of Awareness.”  The two couples walking are lost in their own thoughts and conversation, and the four teenagers playing hacky sack also seem wrapped up in their world.  Yet the beauty of the natural world that drew them there is not entirely gray.  The mother and child in the distance, however, seem totally absorbed by the day, by the place, by both the world and their own living in it.