Surfing. Reflections in the Sea.

A long time ago, I went out on a run.


It was a cold, foggy morning. Like running in a moving gray sphere that is a shadow of the world. I crossed the 1 and cut through a trailer home park and found the beach. The beach on a foggy morning is a very silent place. Even the sounds seem to contribute to the greater overall Silence. Then I saw them: a horde of black seals. Human seals. Hooded up against the cold; floating on a gray sea that itself floated in a sea of gray. Floating out there to appreciate the silence, the power, the surge of a sea at dawn when there is no sun.

I ran along the beach. My run seemed rather lame. I was pretty darn proud of my running abilities - this long before the specter of knee injury - but I was running on solid ground; they seemed to walk on liquid. Walk? Some danced--skidded, slid, tripped, down the front of the waves--only to kick out, sink, and disappear into the gray. The gray that is the sea at dawn.

And I think that's what I like about surfing. It's not only the aspect of speed, adventure, activity. Don't get me wrong: I like the adventure too. The intensity of a wipeout. The feeling of taking flight when you slide down the front of a curling green wall. The sense that your horizon is alive, seething, picking itself up, doubling over on top of itself. I find I even like getting hurt - if it means I've done something out of the ordinary.

But that surface of adrenalin is not the only reason I like surfing. I can get that with a score of other sports. With surfing, it's the ability to emerge myself in something so much greater than myself. The ability to play, like a mouse with a wolf, and escape unharmed or with only a few bruises that are something like medals. The ability to ride raw power on a piece of foam and fiberglass. There's nothing quite like the feeling when it takes, and the board becomes spring-loaded on the wave, and you're crouched - poised, in control.....okay so totally and completely out of control. You can't control the ocean, silly. Even when it feels like it.


That run was a long time ago. Now I'm the person out on the waves. Only I don't wear a hood. And I don't surf in the morning. I used to. I tried to like it....but seriously, the waves die down, the sunrise fades to day, the day starts up and everything else is a let-down. Race to class, work, homework. Even hanging out is a let-down after surfing. That might be the hypothermic effect though....Perhaps things will be better now that I have a wetsuit without holes.

But sunset-surfing? Things just get better. Like a life well-lived. You look forward to it all day. You run across the beach just as the waves are starting to pick up. Chill sand; freezing cold water that laps up your legs, waist, chest. Ouch. Gasp. Ice-water. Literally breath-snatching cold. Dunk your head. Crap. Cold. Gasp. Breathe...ahhh. That's better. Forget about the cold and paddle out gleefully. Pungent taste of salt and brine; smell like old sushi soaked in the salty ocean breeze. Shrivel your lips; scour your face; dread your hair. Salt and sun. The surf picks up, better and better, until the best waves and the most incredible part of the day coincide: sunset on an ocean. The world might be reversed for all you know, and you floating in the sunset and looking up at a sea. And then the moon comes out and you're in the middle of day and night--the juncture of the last glow of coral sun and a trembling moonpath spider-webbed across the water.


I don't know about you, but I can never seem to get close enough to the sunset. It's over-awing, breathtaking--but painfully distant. Makes me ache with an odd sort of pain that seems to burrow out my soul and make it bigger; reveals depths that presumably will make me a better person. It's the same part that you become aware of the more passionately you pray, or love, or try not to love....or begin to miss someone as you watch them die. Perhaps I can never get close enough to the sunset, because it IS perfection--and while our souls are eternal, our minds are still finite--and so the sunset will never fit, and that squeeze is painful. Just like when we pray, or love, or miss someone, we're not dealing with the finite anymore. It's something bigger, grander, eternal--and it's not human, and it doesn't fit in our finite humanity. So it's painful, like trying to fit a foot in a shoe that is too small.



I recently came face to face with death. It was horrific, drawn-out, painful. I sat there at my loved one's bedside, holding her hand and promising that it was not an end....not an end but a change. I told her that I would be there with her until that change, and that I would join her before too long. We all would. There was no reason to be scared. I told myself that when she was gone I'd go out and sit on my surfboard, and stare at the sunset. Remind myself of the eternity that I believe in indubitably enough to promise it to a sane but dying person--but that I can't experience tangibly but for my sunset surf. Burrowing out the depths of my soul. Painful beauty; beautiful pain, for it presumably makes me a better person. The drawing back of the veil - as if the sunset were drawing back its curtain and showing what it is beyond that makes us ache and wish to be closer.


So surfing is not only sport, as I intuited that long-ago day I first saw the surfers dancing in the gray. There is something much grander, bigger, further-reaching about floating in the upside-down sky. Like being face-to-face with eternity. The beauty beyond the ache and the pain. Like the rainbow promises the earth won't again be flooded, the reflection of the sunset in the flood promises the earth is not our bound of reality.

So while surfing improves reality; what I'm surfing in proves what I know to come after. Past the struggling break. Immersed in the ocean; submerged in the sunset. The closest thing to eternity I know of. And I get to play in it. And the shadow of the fog-bound earth slips away. Stillness. Vastness. Silence. Indescribable beauty and a peace that passes all understanding.


It's the closest thing I know to getting the shoe on.