--Rev. Scotty McLellan, Finding Your Religion, pp. 29-30
During college I was spending a spring break visiting my grandmother, who lived a couple of hours north of Miami. I'd come home from a party around midnight, and I decided to take a walk and look at the ocean before going to bed. After scrambling down some steps in the seawall, I found myself alone on a wide stretch of sand. The moon was supposed to be full that night, but the sky was covered by high clouds that transmitted the moonlight as if through a diaphanous veil. Large, smooth ocean swells were slowly breaking on the beach. I walked halfway down to the water and stood for a long time, mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of the waves, the white line of surf that appeared and disappeared, and the sweet, warm breeze rustling my shirt.
Suddenly the moon burst through the clouds with a single shaft of light, focused directly on me. As if in a Cecil B. deMille movie, I was at the center of a drama, with the surf beginning to sound like music and the air electrified with anticipation of what was going to happen next. Unconsciously I stretched out my arms to my sides, palms up. I could feel my heart beating within my chest. It seemed timed to the breaking of the waves. The moonlight appeared to pulsate with the same rhythm. The breeze became one with my own breath. The moon hole in the clouds kept widening until the whole beach was bathed in white light. Everything throbbed with connection.
It was all too much, too charged. I fell to my knees and rocked back on my heels. Harmony, fusion, fullness--words like these filled my mind. I had a strong sense of presence: of my being fully present in the world and the world being utterly present to me. Was there something more? A driven presence? Was God going to speak to me from the clouds? I tried to listen. Hyperaware, I also looked, and smelled, and felt. As I did, I noticed that a dark shape was beginning to form along the white line of surf. It became larger and larger. Slowly, I realized it was moving. Toward me. Although I had no real point of perspective, it looked big and round.
I may have taken ten minutes to get close enough for me to identify what it was. Meanwhile, the clouds had covered the moon again and nature had returned to its component parts. Now I realized that a huge sea turtle was approaching me, measuring some four or five feet from head to tail weighing hundreds and hundreds of pounds. Its progress was slow and ungainly as it dragged all of its weight up the beach on four paddlelike flippers. It didn't seem concerned that a human animal was on the beach too. In fact, it advanced single-mindedly right up to where I was on the dry part of the beach. It stopped dead, not more than ten yards from me.
For several minutes there was silence and stillness. Then the turtle began swiping at the sand with its front flippers. Soon all four flippers were violently thrashing about, throwing sand in all directions, occasionally sprinkling me. I sat and watched. It kept digging, for a long time. Half an hour later it had created a pit a couple of yards across and several feet deep.
Next, the turtle carefully scooped out sand from the middle of the pit, a cup at a time, to make a deep hole into which it finally lowered its tail. Then eggs began dropping--dozens and dozens, maybe a hundred by the time she was done. I became very moved by what was going on. So this is it! I thought. The great cycle of life is being elucidated for me--and only for me--on this big wide beach, here and now. Why? Was this just a random moment? Was it a coincidence that a shaft of moonlight had aligned everything around me just before this turtle emerged? Was it simply happenstance that with so much Florida shoreline available, this turtle had dragged herself up to within a few yards of where I was kneeling?
I didn't have any answers, but I felt very grateful to have been visited in this way. Whether my conscious mind liked it or not, it all seemed miraculous. I sat in awe as one white egg after another filled the hole. When she was done, the turtle gently raked sand into the hole to cover the eggs and packed it down with a flipper. Then the violent thrashing and slinging of sand began again, filling the large pit back in. Ten minutes later the surface was level, and the turtle turned back to the water. She lumbered down the beach and straight into the surf. For a couple of minutes a round, dark shape could still be seen as the water receded between the waves, and then she disappeared for good.
--Rev. Scotty McLellan, Finding Your Religion, pp. 207-209