Findhorn Beach at 3.40 am, taken during the solstice.

It's almost as if the lack of light shades you in your unorthodox quest to discover the beach at this untimely hour. The queasy calm makes you uneasy, as if the sea has issued its warning- what warning you know not. But that just makes you press on. You close in and sit on the makeshift wood, running your clean fingers over the coarse wood, weathered by wind and sand. Your cuticles catch grains of sand and the nerves in you fingertips respond to every nook and cranny of the wood. Your eyes scan the horizon and the chilly wind dulls your senses, making you shiver as it passes. But you expect it. You don't resent it the way you would on a normal morning at the beach, because it's 3.40 am and you haven't any right to invade the privacy of this shore, the time when secrets are exchanged between the sea and sand, and you are ashamed to be evesdropping even when the conversation is foreign. Your toes clutch at sand and you are drawn, ever lured, by the repetitive, intermittent swishing of the waves. Waves bring things, and they remove things. A bit of driftwood, and old sandal. The horizon has shifted ever so slightly, but you don't notice. You want in on the secret of this shore, the whisperings you hear but don't catch, the wispy wanderings of the creatures you don't see in the sand. But they don't speak your language, although you've tried to listen, and there is no true translator of nature save it's creator. You've paid out your sand dollars but the hermit crabs have shrugged you off and gone home into their underground worlds. So you take a picture, and you trod away in the sand, the last of the wind chasing you gently.