“Sometime in the high afternoon, I worked up the beans to enter the lineup. I paddled out, and was pleasantly relieved to feel at ease.” Photo: Angelica Clemmer
I caught a few waves that day, but never really stood up. I fell off over and over, and chatted with the friendly locals. They were all very kind, and even offered to let me borrow their boards for a while. But somehow it wasn’t the adrenaline-filled rush of paddling in and catching the wave that really struck me. It was just being out there; out where in the dreams of my childhood, I was at rest in the spiritual clarity.
While floating, waiting for a set under the Delaware sun, the sparkling water blinding me. The locals laughing and chatting in the lineup, a song in my heart, and peace in my soul – I did not feel afraid. Fear was released from my body like a glorious exhalation, and all the sweet, salty air I breathed filled me with absolute bliss. The tide came in, and the swell flattened. Yet I stayed out for what felt like hours, exchanging stories with the others, and taking in the breathtaking sunset. In the Atlantic, the sun doesn’t set over the water, but the light still filled the sky with dreamlike colors, reds and pinks and scarlet and violet. The air was so clean and pure, a world away from the city sky back home.
In my final moments out there, with the illustrious horizon filling me with such joy, my entire self was transformed. The supernatural beauty of the seascape, the salty water consecrating my skin and soul, and the profound revitalization I felt were powerful agents of healing. In some ways I had known all along, but I realized in that moment that I had found what I was looking for. I feared nothing, and only felt peace with myself. No insecurity, second thoughts, or second-guessing. Just flawless, endless, unadulterated lucidity, where the horizon meets the sea.
Months later, I went surfing briefly in late winter, in thick early morning fog and forty-degree water. I took a beating, but it only humbled me into further spiritual reverence for the sport, or religious order and cult, or whatever it is that is surfing.
I want to live the dream and the search, not just for that peace, but for the perfect wave. They are reflections of one another. It has since carried over into the rest of my life, and it is a source of constant inspiration.
I often wear a silver shark tooth and surf board pendant, a memento from that day. It’s important to keep the virtue of surfing alive in my daily life to draw strength from. It’s a powerful way of reconnecting with my authentic self, long lost in the torrent of my tumultuous upbringing. As well as a tattoo of a Hawaiian surfer’s proverb, Mai huli ‘oe i Kokua e ke Kai, or, never turn your back to the ocean.
I never have, and I never will.
