From The Inside

Another May Gray morning here in Dana Point. I sleep in until almost 7:00. I’m meeting up with my Sunday beach friend at 10:00 so I have plenty of time. So much time that I even get my Sunday Trader Joe’s run in just before I leave. I know that store like the back of my hand and can knock that errand out in a half hour.

By the time I leave for the beach at 9:45, there is some significant blue sky showing. This is more than a hint of possibility, it is truly happening. When I pull into the parking lot, there is still some lingering haze to the south but the sky is mostly blue to the north. If there was any question as to which direction to swim today, this settles it.

I meet my friend and we head down to the beach. The water is more calm that I expected. The surf is supposed to pick up today according to the surf report. I’m not seeing it. Still, what I do see is very nice.

As I am walking and talking with my friend, which is rare for me - I’m so used to this being very much a solo experience, I have neglected to take my obligatory photos of the northern and southern views of the beach. I also have not dipped my feet in the water. So I do all of this at once just before heading into the water. The water feels good - pretty close to what it felt like on Friday.

I get in and start to swim north - towards the blue sky. It is indeed pleasant. I’m meditating over a piece of music I was playing on the piano just before I left my apartment. It’s a piece that I have often found myself playing for years. At least the general left hand chord progression is the same although I might play it in different keys. I’m playing it is a different key than I usually do today and I don’'t know enough to know what key that is. I’m sure I could figure it out but I don’t care to right now.

This piece transports me to a different place. I honestly don’t know what that place is. It brings these sort of memories but they are not memories. It’s like when there is a dream you just can’t remember but you feel like you were just there and the emotional experience is still raw in your insides but you just can’t piece together any kind of a coherent timeline. I find myself doing that here. I am struggling to place myself in that music and feel the feels that it summons and maybe, just maybe, I can remember something. I just can’t. It’s like a memory from a different dimension. In that dimension, which I have no reference for here, I know there was love - immense love. And now there is a yearning to return and I don’t know how to get back because I don’t know where “back” is. I don’t even know if it exists in time and space. I’m willing to find out.

I keep swimming and I also find myself reflecting on the day I had with my 5 year old son yesterday. It was a good day as days with my son go. Some are harder than others. Parenting is very difficult for me. It was something I largely “delegated” to my ex-wife in the past. I would spend time with my kids and take them places but I left the heavy lifting to my ex-wife. Our youngest, the one who I spent the day with yesterday and most all Saturdays, has been the most challenging of our three kids by far. Sometimes it just feels like everything is a struggle. There are great days and terrible days. Thankfully we have not had a terrible day in a good while. Yesterday, I was committed to make it a good day. I feel like my son has been placed in my life to teach me things and what I often interpret as misery perhaps has the power to free something deep within myself.

What I am noticing is that my son is teaching me to not be so rigid in my thinking and expectations. When I am with my son, I have to seriously adjust the outcomes I want to yield from our interactions. I want to be able to tell him to do something and have him do it. That’s how things rolled with me and my dad when I was his age. That is what society tells us how things should be between a parent and a child. However this is not my experience with my son. If I try to force my will upon him (what my dad did with me), everything just gets worse and it becomes painfully clear that there must be another way forward because this one is going nowhere.

I have read several parenting books over the last year. I never did that with my other kids. My ex-wife read those. That was her role, or the role I gave her in my own little inner world. Well it’s time to change that. Many of these books are helpful but it just feels like my son is in some different category than the children discussed in these books and it can be difficult to transpose the lesson of the text onto my experiences with my son. Still I sort of get the gist of what the books are trying to convey, but in the end it is up to me to make the adjustments. Me?!! Up to me?!! What do I know about any of this? Well I am coming to believe that I know all that I need to know. This is no different than all the other truly important things we are here to learn in our human experience. Everything we need to know is accessible to us FROM THE INSIDE. We don’t need a book or a bible or a guru. Of course all of those things can be super useful but ultimately we have to learn to access the truth from our own hearts.

So I find myself with my son and having to throw out the book and digging down deep into my heart to figure out what I should do. Yesterday I found that I have to be more flexible. When my son pleads that he really wants to do something a particular way and then I find myself insisting that I don’t want him to do that, I suddenly have to ask myself - what is so terrible about what he is asking to do? Maybe he wants to pour his hot sauce into his water. Well as long as it doesn’t end up all over the table, maybe this is not such a horrible thing to do. So he wants to mix his sushi with his miso soup. The fact is that in the end, he ate it all and enjoyed it. Why make a big struggle over keeping the sushi and miso soup separate? These are just a couple examples of the million “crazy” things my son finds entertaining.

I get to the northern turn around point of the swim and this ends up being the highlight of the whole swim. First, it’s beautiful. The sun is shining and the sky is pure blue and the surface of the water is smooth and then all of a sudden I see a dolphin fin emerge and suddenly the moment demands reverence. I don’t see much of the dolphin. Soon I lose track of it completely. Then I see this large patch kelp about 30 feet west of me. I decide to swim to it before turning back. I get to it and there is a large and vibrant forest below the water here. I am staring south over the water at the bits and pieces of kelp leaves poking above the surface when all of the sudden a cormorant pops up from under the water right in front of me. It startles me and makes me laugh. For a second I thought maybe it was that dolphin and how great would that have been? It has something in its mouth. I can’t see if it is a fish or a large piece of kelp. The whole thing is just so delightful to witness and captures why it is that I love this so much. I swim around and through the kelp and just love it. It is all so thick and alive.

I head back south and a little ways further south I bump into this big long and hard piece of kelp. It kind of freaks me out at first. I almost wonder if it was a tree branch or lumber (I have collided with both on previous swims). It’s a particular variety of kelp called bull kelp that has a long stem with a boyant bulb at the end. I linger here for a little bit just starring at it.

The rest of the swim back is utterly delightful. The water is very comfortable and visibility is good. I meet back up with my fiend on the beach and we watch two dolphins swimming very close to shore. She is not from around here and the beach is much more of a novelty experience for her than it is for me so I am super happy that she gets to witness this dolphin wonderfulness because in my opinion it is about as wonderful as it gets here.