Critical Mass

I just can’t seem to keep myself from the beach these past several days. I don’t know if it is the super pleasant conditions or if I am just avoiding the elliptical machine. I think it is both but man conditions have been so nice.

Last night I realized I forgot to read the water temperature forecast that came out the day before. I usually read those before the ink dries (or while the pixels are still rendering). Boy did that forecast get it wrong. It was predicting doom and gloom with a drop in temperatures due to wind during the first couple days of the week. Well here we are on Wednesday afternoon and I have not seen any drop. It is totally delightful out there.

I left here just a little after 10:00 and skies are perfectly clear and there is a light southwesterly breeze. I get out of my car and everything about this place is inviting me to stay a while. Why yes, I think I will. The stairs still smell like rosemary from yesterday’s trimming.

The tide is rising and the surf is small, at least at my usual entry point. There are some decent waves breaking at the point in front of the Ritz which I am about to be swimming to as soon as I get in the water, which doesn’t take long. I walk out a little ways and soon start to swim and dive beneath the small breaking waves. It maybe feels a touch cooler than yesterday but that might be because I’m out a couple hours earlier today. At any rate it is still extremely comfortable.

There is absolutely no lack of sunshine here and I let it penetrate every pore of my body. I head north towards Salt Creek and as I pass the point in front of the main lifeguard tower, I am just on the other side of the larger breaking waves and I watch the surfers inshore compete for them.

I continue towards Monarch. Everything is blue all around me. The water splashes near my face as my hands plunge into the water in front of me and I watch the small white bubbles pass behind me as I proceed forward. The breeze stirs up the surface but it’s not too turbulent - just enough to prove that it is very much alive. I glide on this breathing giant. There is no need to be sneaky. It is fully aware of who and where I am. We work together.

I stare into the blue horizon beyond me and lose myself in this late Spring day that thinks it is Summer. I’m not going to try to convince it otherwise. What is the water and air telling me today? I’m trying to let go of every thought and every compulsion to try and make this moment something other than what it is.

In my mind’s eye I see colors and textures and fragments of memories that come scrambled and unattached to any kind of larger image or vision. I feel brief sensations come over me that transport me to some time in the past or a previous lifetime that mirrors the feeling I have right now in this water. On the way back south, I watch the bluff and the houses on top of it and I feel as though I have lived in each one at some point perhaps on a completely different timeline.

There are some reputable scientists that speculate that at every moment, all of the possible outcomes of the present break off to form their own separate parallel reality. I feel now as if they are all reconverging and collapsing back into a single critical mass of infinite potentials.