The Sky is Rearranging Itself

Well today is the day. I’m giving a talk in just a couple hours at the Laguna Beach Unitarian Universalist church about my swimming and photography. I’m a little nervous but not much. This is not my first rodeo. There is just this one part of the talk - the most important one to me - that feels super raw and is hard for me to articulate and sometimes it is hard to get the right words out because it is SO much not about words. How do you communicate things that are so special because they were never meant to be spoken. Well I guess I am about to find out.

I head to the beach at about 6:30. I meet up with the Sunday morning swim group I often see and we chat for a while. I was supposed to swim with someone who didn’t show up but it’s cool. Who wants to be anywhere before 7AM on a Sunday morning?

I head to the water and the surface looks all wobbly. There has been a bit of a bump in the surf this weekend but not nearly as significant as things were a couple weeks ago. I love the fact that I can now watch the surf at THIS beach on my early morning dog walks, and it looked pretty tame. Maybe shoulder high and lots of space between sets.

I walk out into the water and quickly start swimming. The water feels a little cooler than Thursday but still plenty warm. The water is also particularly dark right here. It’s been like this for the past week. It is super dark and silty in spots particularly close to shore and then it clears up into a more pleasant shade of blue but not necessarily clear. So I am somewhat relieved when I reach that blue effervescent color past the surf.

It is super pleasant out. It is about an hour after sunrise and there is a good amount of the marine layer left here but it is all breaking apart and it looks ready to give way to blue sky before too long. I can see the sun peeking between some clouds just over the bluff. It is all very pretty. It’s not one of those ecstatic sunrise moments. It’s something different, but not disappointing. One has the sense that things are changing. The sky is rearranging itself and getting ready for the day to come.

As I make my way up the beach, the water is moving all over the place - up and down - and it is pulling me one moment and pushing me the next. It is hard to tell in which direction the current wants to move. Either way I like it. The temperature fluctuations in the water are pretty dramatic. The warmer spots are super warm. I mean really warm. The colder spots are almost a welcome relief.

My mind is pretty occupied with my upcoming talk later in the morning. I have put a lot of preparation into this. It will be a super small audience but I am using this as an opportunity to shape a presentation that I would like to give in other venues as well. I want this to be special and I want to be able to articulate how this ocean makes me feel. My experience of frequently entering the ocean over the past several years has changed me and I want to talk about it. I want to inspire others. What exactly I hope this will give to others I am not really clear on. Sure I would like to see more people try this. Sure I would like the lessons that I have learned to perhaps show others a different perspective and way forward in their lives. Mostly, I guess I just want to take all of this light and love that the ocean has bestowed on me and throw it out into the universe and let it wash over listening ears and do whatever it is that it intends to do. I have no doubt that it will be good.