Love is like a bathing suit. This is the first deeply inspired thought I have on a perfect beach day in Bermuda. Yes, love of the romantic kind is exactly like a bathing suit. It's hard to find the thing that fits, the thing that flatters, the thing that makes you feel as gorgeous as you hope you are and doesn't cost you more than you can sanely spare. When you find it - this ideal love or bathing suit - you dream that it will feel as good forever as it does the day luck dropped it in your path.

I have this inspired thought right after buying the perfect bathing suit in the Bermudian capital of Hamilton, where the streets buzz with mopeds and the sidewalks crawl with tourists who've been coughed out of jumbo cruise ships for a day of fevered shopping. I have not yet made it to the beach.

I am too busy to make it to the beach. Never mind that I have come here seeking inspiration on a beach. I am a city dweller. Beaches are a foreign muse. Like so many of my hyperactive ilk, I find inspiration the modern urban way - in deadlines, espressos, Snickers bars. I live so far from the inspirations of an island beach that months ago I'd thrown out my only bathing suit, which, by the way, was so hideous I couldn't imagine why I'd once adored it.

But now I've found the perfect new one, a yellow-flowered one-piece number with spaghetti straps on top and, below, sufficient coverage of a woman's broadest charm. I check a clock: 3 p.m. A good time to get inspired on the beach. I head up along busy Reid Street and climb a short set of stairs.

"Double cappuccino, please," I say to the counter clerk at the Rock Island coffeehouse. No way can I relax on a beach until I've had my regular inspiration feed. Cup tensed in my fingers, I sit down, flip open a book.

"Too often in our increasingly fast-paced world, we tend to lose sight of the beauty around us," says the book, a Bermuda tourist guide I've pilfered from my hotel room. I nod. So true, so true. Many artists, says the book, have been inspired by Bermuda's sea and sand. The book does not mention coffee.

"The Wall Street crash of 1929," the book goes on, "brought a new focus to the artists visiting Bermuda¿. Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley sought refuge from personal crises on her soft pink shores."

Soft pink shores. My personal crises could definitely use some of those. Inspired by the prospect, I drain my coffee cup and head off - to a souvenir shop to buy a fridge magnet of a Bermuda beach scene by Winslow Homer. It is there that I have a second deeply inspired thought on this perfect beach day in Bermuda: To be inspired by an island beach, you must stop behaving like a cappuccino freak in rush hour. For some of us, that takes training, and so on another perfect beach day in Bermuda I enlist a man named Dean Smith to be my drill sergeant in beach-inspiration boot camp.

"Serenity," says Smith, a 44-year-old native Bermudian who has agreed to show me Bermuda's most inspiring beaches and muse on what makes them so. "Bliss. Beauty. Those are the wonderful qualities people look for on a beach, especially when they come from a hurried society and all they see is a car, a business, an office, an airplane."

"Serenity," I concur with a fervent nod. "Take me there."

Smith is tall and muscular, a runner and a swimmer, dressed today in green Bermuda shorts, a loose teal print shirt, leather sandals, and a gold neck chain that says "D." He would look at home in a rock star's entourage. In truth, he recently left his job as a hotel bellman to become pastor of a small church.

"Pastor! Pastor!"

We have driven up a road toward a stretch of beach closed to the public, but the elderly woman in the guardhouse recognizes Pastor Smith from afar and waves him through.

"God has found favor on us," the pastor says as we sneak up the road.

We travel past orange hibiscus blooms and pungent oleander, park at the crest of a small hill, take off our shoes, push past the giant leaves of the bay grape trees and emerge on an empty stretch of tawny sand that fades into a surf as frothy as cappuccino foam.

I'm sorry. Did I say cappuccino? I digress. Today's agenda is serenity.

"This is a dream," says Smith as we walk. To the right, natural limestone arches rise out of the sand. To the left, a solitary fishing boat sits on water that glides from green to blue across the shadowy reef, then shades into a pewter sky. The sun drifts in and out of clouds that hover close and huge like spaceships.

Smith has lived with beaches all his life, and yet, he says, the sight transports him every time. Back when he was a bellman, he often carried luggage to waterfront rooms before the guests arrived, and sometimes he'd just stand there on the carpet, his duties briefly at bay, staring at the beach. He swims every day - "a Bermudian who doesn't swim is a disgrace to his country" - and still the novelty of the beach is as constant as the pink sand and the Monday morning cruise ships.

Smith says that when he meditates, he sees beaches. He urges his congregation to seek solace in them, too.

"I deal with people who have many frustrations in life," he says. "And the Bible speaks of water as life." He grins. "Am I being philosophical enough?"

In fact, as we walk, he has named the essential inspirational power of an island beach. Meditation. What is meditation but a release from our ordinary cluttered thoughts? And what's a beach good for, if not that?

A beach is a place of unaccustomed colors, sounds, sensations. It shifts your normal gears into a dreamy idle. In this altered state, you feel your body more, and the more you feel your body, the more clearly you hear your thoughts. Your mind can go from muddy to clear, your heart from heavy to light all because you feel warm sand instead of shoes against your feet.

But the inspirational power of a beach is more than mere sensation. Something in a beach's air and water changes your rhythms. It changes your breath. As anyone who's ever tried to meditate understands, to change your thoughts you have to change your breath. On a beach you breathe more deeply. You exhale.

Walking along this forbidden beach with Pastor Smith, I'm inspired to this thought: Inspiration is at least half respiration.

At dusk on my final perfect beach day in Bermuda, I take my perfect new bathing suit along with a copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley down to Horseshoe Bay.

The daytime crowds have shaken out their towels and hosed the sand off their feet and headed home to nurse their sunburns. Now, a hefty woman who looks as if she hasn't exercised in years has been inspired to jog, panting, up and down the beach. A beach always inspires dreams of self-improvement. In a cove around the bend, a young man and woman have been inspired to kiss beyond the bounds of public decency. Off behind some rocks, so have two young men. A beach inspires you to break the rules.

As a gold glow settles over the darkening sand and water, I feel inspired to phone the airline and say I'm staying a few more days.

But I lie down in the sand, crack open my book, and promptly run across a thought the talented Mr. Ripley has about a woman who's a writer: "You didn't write a book with your little finger, lolling on a beach half the day."

And that's the flip side of finding inspiration on an island beach. If you're going to create, if you're going to produce, if you're going to turn your inspiration into action, you generally have to leave the beach.

The English poet William Wordsworth once said that poetry is born of emotion recollected in tranquillity. A beach can provide tranquillity, but it rarely provides the essence of the art. The essence of poetry, or any art, generally comes from ordinary life, from the difficult, the maddening, the mundane. The beauty of the island beach is that it lets you breathe calmly enough that you can hear your thoughts about your ordinary life. It helps you express yourself instead of freeze.

And you can take it with you. Like Pastor Smith, you can go to the beach in your mind. You can carry the images and the sensations of a real beach home and take yourself there when you need an inspiration refresher course. You can also take with you, in my case, the perfect new bathing suit and that Winslow Homer beach-scene fridge magnet, which I intend to put on the coffeemaker.