Couch
In search of the elusive night’s sleep I recently purchased what I believe to be the best bed on the planet.
The goal? Deeply restorative, profoundly rejuvenating sleep - for hours and hours and hours. OK, eight hours. Eight blessed hours.
Aha. After much deep-dive research the new bed arrives with the sheets, pillows, hypoallergenic comforter and dyson allergen air filter that softly churns the air to near hospital purity throughout the night. My sanctuary, a zen masterpiece so softly lit and decorated as to raise a new bar for achievement in total slumber design.
And then last night I crawled out of the sleep sanctuary back onto my worn out couch, opened the windows, let the cool ocean breeze wash over me and take me away to slumberland.
For sale: awesome new bed and beddings. Cheap.
The couch.
Rear Window
Feel like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.
Except I’m not in a wheelchair witnessing a murder across the courtyard.
Not right now anyway.
But I am in a small room looking out my window at the microcosm of the world as I know it. The Santa Monica Pier just to the north, and Shutters a few blocks south. Yep, cloistered here with my cameras & coffee cups.
Well, coffee cup. I have one coffee cup.
Here I am watching the world coming and going, ebbing and flowing, the moon endlessly & effortlessly passing through one cycle after another every 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes. Marking the tides, the seasons, the time on our planet. For eons it has been and for eons it will be.
Pink Moon, Waning Gibbous phase.
Well, until we are all toast.
Eons. What does ‘eon’ mean anyway?
It’s a Greek word used to describe vast, vague timescales. Synonyms might include age, era, or eternity.
Or it can be the largest formal unit of geologic time, such as the Phanerozoic, Proterozoic, Archean, and Hadean eons.
Or, colloquially, it represents a very long time, used in phrases like "it took eons" or "I haven't seen them in eons" to emphasize an exaggerated wait.
And then here is my bell-ringer: Refers to a divine power or being emanating from the Supreme Being. Ding ding ding ding!
In Gnosticism, an eon, aeon, is a divine, eternal being emanating from the one true God (the Source/the Monad). Aeons reside in the Pleroma, fullness or divine light and represent specific, personified divine attributes like Wisdom (Sophia) or Truth. They are essentially spiritual energy-intelligences.
Gnostic Nomad Graphic.
This is what I muse over and have studied for many years, most particularly in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Elaine Pagels.
Aeons form the spiritual world of light and emanate in pairs (syzygies). A lower aeon, often Sophia (Wisdom), caused a crisis that led to the creation of the flawed material world by the Demiurge.
Unlike angels, which are often associated with the inferior, malevolent creator (Demiurge) and material world, aeons are divine, immaterial beings. Essentially, aeons represent the transition from pure spirit to material existence, acting as intermediaries between the divine realm and the lower, chaotic world.
Yep, sorry to say but looks like the creation of our world was flawed.
Whoops!
Excuse my digression.
Outside my window storms will roll in. The population of the homeless and drug users will increase or decrease with the tides and seasons.
The beach can be teeming with life, families coming in for Spring Break in the days, or in the evenings becoming populated by the great swell of humanity flocking to the neon raves, stick shadow silhouettes filling the sand with vibrance and movement spanning from Muscle Beach to the pier and beyond - tightroping, jugging, glowing sticks leaving traces in the night sky, the ferris wheel spinning around and around, changing from one swirling graphic into another, the dancing, flailing, rhythms growing in intensity as the night grows closer and closer, eventually enveloping them all into one living, pulsing mass, entranced by the hypnotic beat music that covers them like a warm blanket, swirling and moving with the onshore breezes, dizzying, intoxicating, flashing ferris-wheel neon lights reflecting on the waves, the sand, the faces… is this madness or epiphany? Ecstasy? All are taken away, all are taken to a never-never land that melts into one place without individuals, one place without a beginning, one place without end. Always there. Always pulsing. Always on. Just beyond the veil of our mundane lives. Hidden away. Hidden away. For forever. Our birthright. The one true dance of redemption. A Paradise lost.
Older couples stroll down the boardwalk while endless lines of genetically perfect young men and women jog past, resplendent and oh-so proud in their ephemeral très sportif attire. Forever young, forever strong, forever resilient, forever confident, forever poised.
Until they are not.
Sometimes the beach is empty save for the huddles of birds clumped together on the sand.
Birds of a feather do flock together, you know.
The water can be beautiful, or contaminated and unsafe to swim in.
A person will die in the throes of an overdose right under my window. I will awaken to the flashing lights of a police car, or an ambulance.
Another toe tag.
Toe Tag.
The next morning families will walk hand in hand down to the beach for another day of imagination and fun.
Castles in Sand.
It rains. The sand castles wash away. The tide comes in. Goes out. Leaves the sand smooth again without a trace of the castles so meticulously fashioned earlier in the day.
Wasn’t that a heart drawn in the sand? Did you see it? I did. Etched with a piece of driftwood that floated in on the high tide, inlaid with the initials of a young, anonymous couple awash in the sea of their all-consuming passions. Yes. I saw it. The heart. The initials. The arrow. The footsteps headed away, step by step growing fainter, more shallow, then gone. The weathered stick of driftwood drifts out to sea on the incoming tide. The heart half washes away at first, but later disappears completely as the relentless, unstoppable motion of the sea takes its course.
Brand new starts.
Mornings. Sunrise. Walks. Birds. Brown Pelicans flying in formation inches above the waves. Willets and Sanderlings darting in and out with the waves poking for sandcrabs. Western Gulls coming to life from their nightly perch on the rails of the roller coaster.
Brown Pelicans.
Flock of Seagulls.
Sanderlings.
Willets.
Somehow this all a reflection of the creation by the Demiurge who thought himself the only God. He knew of nothing but himself. And Sofia? Sofia longed to create something all by herself. A secret. Her own proud accomplishment. That’s why she hid him away. That is why he knew no other. They would see her brilliance, those other aeons, and she would be freed from their interfering influence at last! And so he became to himself the all. Omnipotent. All powerful. The One Creator.
This did not work out very well for Sophia long term.
The myth of Narcissus. In the Apocryphon of John the Demiurge is described as a being of ignorance. Yaldabaoth (the Demiurge) looks and sees what he thinks is his reflection in the shining water, but which is actually a reflection of the true, divine Light from the higher realm (the Pleroma). Seeing this image causes him to think he is the only god, and so he decides to create a world in his own image, not realizing he is only imitating a higher power.
So mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest of them all?
Whoops!
Pink Moon.
The full "Pink Moon,"
99.9% illuminated, symbolizing renewal, growth, and the blooming of early spring flowers.
Photo taken from my window
April 2, 2026
3:51 am
Latitude: 34.01° N,
Longitude:118.49° W,
iPhone 16 pro max camera
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