Always Full, Always Empty

I’ve come to the beach for the weekend, a yearly ritual for me. When we arrived, the warmth of the coast and the tangle of trees is unexpectedly welcoming. I feel held and cosseted in a way that the mountains don’t offer. Mountain air is brisk and brilliant. The ocean air is insistent and accommodating. It is, not entirely surprisingly, hard to relax in this accommodation. I am so much more comfortable with struggle, with the press of tasks, the constant remembering of what comes next. At the beach, all of that strategizing and planning falls away upon the touch of sand. It slips away unnoticed as I walk the length of the beach, flirting with the edge of water and savoring the knowledge that I will enter the water very soon. I haven’t brought a board with me. I want the unadulterated waves for now. I want to be immersed in the salt seaness, feel the effortless buoyancy and bask as a speck in the ocean.
Slowly, I yield to the waves, empty the particulars and fill with ocean time, a rhythm sure and steady, a daily tide. The body, too, has tides, waves of rhythm cast upon the shore of our functioning, the tide of breakfast, the tide of sleep, the tide of cocoa on the porch. Sometimes we heed these tides, attentive to their rising and falling, and other times we push through them or ignore them altogether. Interestingly, the body tides change just as the sea tides do, that is, they shift each day a bit, shifting with the micro and macro world. I love that when I travel, the awareness of this shift is heightened, amplified in the strangeness, the newness of my surroundings. Here, at the ocean, I want to walk at low tide on the beach, swim or surf at high tide, and generally give in to the waves. How, then, to navigate both tides, the ocean tides, the body tides?

Sunday night for four hours we watched the moon.  We watched the people, the pets and the fish, too.  People were fishing from the pier.  At the peak of this magical lunar eclipse, several families stood at the end of the pier with fishing poles cast into the dark water.  Above the moon turned quietly from bright to warm, from eye-catching to a soft reddish globe.  Meanwhile, someone landed a giant redfish, whose mouth was gently opening and closing as it lay on the pier.  The crowd gathered around to witness this fish, to observe either its demise or its release, no one was sure, at first. But the young man who caught it reassured everyone he would send it back to the water after it’s picture was taken.  His partner held the fish gently in her arms, like a lovely baby, and smiled for the camera.  The fish opened and closed its mouth slowly, but didn’t squirm. It glistened as the moon had, a shivering white.  And finally with a round of clapping, the fish was returned to the water.

While we watched we recited a prayer, Ever-Present Good’s Prayer of Intention.  In the Buddhist tradition, this prayer is said to have the power to free all of those who hear it from the suffering of our world.   Surrounded by darkness, gathered at the edge of the continent, filled with waves, we emptied our hearts, wishing for all those who were suffering, fish, animal and human, to receive our wishes. 
Captured by the moon, my friend and I stood transfixed on the pier for the first few hours of the transformation.  At some point, we realized that perhaps we would be happier on the beach, where it was likely, quieter and darker.  When it began the moon was low and harder to see down on the shore, so the pier was the best spot to start, but now, with the moon high in the sky, we hurried to find a sandy spot on the beach.  We lay down in silence, and bear witness to the magnificent globe as it hues from pale yellow to red to orange to brown to gray and back to a glistening white.  We feel altered, somehow brought to the edge, intoxicated by the earth and sky in a way so old as to be unspeakable. Full of moonlight and empty of anything else.