Fighting Zombies

I got sick last weekend and have not been in the water the last four days. I’m definitely feeling better now. Managed to run to Doheny yesterday and just have a lingering soar throat and cough. Nothing like icy cold water to nurse that soar throat. Am I right?!

I left the house at about 10:45 this morning. It’s a picture perfect cloudless day. The air temperature is just inching above 60.

I’m preparing myself for the cold water. Monday’s weekly water temperature forecast was titled: “Bring the Booties.” Looks like things have come down about a degree and could come down more this coming weekend. So far this pattern is consistent with my last two years of winter swimming experiences. Temps plummet in late Fall and then just fall a degree every few weeks until they magically start to rise starting in the last few days of March. I survived the last two years and this year won’t be any different.

I watch as I create a doomsday experience in my head but I know I will get out of that water in an hour and be so glad that I got in. That’s not saying it won’t be challenging - especially the last 20 minutes.

I get to the parking lot and the scene is just beautiful. It’s a bit cool out with a very light breeze. The water looks smooth.

I reach the sand and it’s just starting to come down from high tide. The water feels cold on my feet but not much or any colder than last week.

I make my way out into the water. I don’t feel any significant (or insignificant) drop in the ocean floor today and it’s a perfectly sandy bottom. It still feels a bit on the shallow side even after I’m a good 20 feet out but the sand is obviously continuing to make its way back to normal after January’s bulldozing of surf.

Soon I dive in and start to swim. Even with these recent drops in temperature, the initial plunge does not feel overwhelming. It is absolutely cold but perhaps I am getting better at surrendering to the feeling of cold. I give myself over to it and I connect with a theme I have been ruminating over for the past couple weeks.

A week ago Sunday I was at church which was overall a good experience that week. However I just felt kind of high strung. I felt like I was striving to achive some kind of spiritual feeling that I thought I was “supposed” to be feeling. On the way to and from church in the car I was wrestling with words: atonement, the fall, heaven and hell. I was feeling like a heretic, not wanting to feel like a heretic, knowing that I’m really not a heretic, having arguments with fictitious evangelicals in my head about why I’m not a heretic. Finally this thought/sensation spontaneously came over me - stop trying. This spiritual path is not about grappling with concepts and ideas and trying to fit into feelings we think we should have. Just let go of all of that and trust Jesus to do the inner work that needs to be done and lead me to the place I need to be.

I’ve had a few of these kinds of experiences and I would describe them as a feeling encoded message. It’s like a message with no words but rather an image in my head that I can’t translate properly to words accompanied by a feeling that flows through my own internal interpreters and filters into an idea of letting go. Yet that phrase, “letting go,” doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s the image and feeling where the actual message lives but I just can’t articulate it. There is this calming darkness and a white outline in the distance and lots of water somewhere and a sense of stillness that smells like green and tastes like seven. Does that make any sense? No, I didn’t think so. I think back to this moment now and it is easier for me to recall where on PCH I was driving at the time than the abstract images in my mind’s eye and somehow the memory of that spot on Coast Highway transmits that same feeling.

Then this last Saturday I write this blog post that was my attempt to mentally regurgitate the thoughts I have been having on “The Fall of man” for the past few weeks. I believe the fall is more of a story of our spiritual and intellectual evolution than our eternal damnation. I thought getting those words out would make me feel better but it didn’t. I mean I wasn’t in anguish or anything but it just shifted my obsession from the fall to the whole conservative Christian belief system about heaven and hell. I start googling (my favorite bible study tool) about what the bible says about hell. Here is the thing. I have read the bible a few times over the past couple years and it just doesn’t say a lot about hell (or heaven) - especially the Old Testament. Those folks just seem to “sleep with their ancestors.” Suddenly the New Testament comes around and the Jews have this sort of schism between Pharisees and Sadducees on this concept of some future resurrection. Overall there are a few versus here and there about the afterlife but take out Revelation and there is not a lot of content on the matter. However if you pick up a right wing Christian pamphlet off the ground with the word “gospel” (good news) on the cover, the whole Jesus thing seems to be fire insurance covering where you will end up after death. Some “good news” there you probably wish you would have never read.

The eternal hell theme just seems reminiscent of some sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian colony where at first glance in looks like a eutopia. You have been fighting zombies for the last ten years but now you find this colony where people are driving Teslas and sending their kids to the playground. There are lots of hugs and laughter and chocolate. CHOCOLATE. After about a month in this lovely place you stumble across this pit filled with people who have had their limbs severed but are kept alive. You ask around about this. No one is surprised or seems worried. “Oh yeah…they didn’t sign off on the prophet manifesto. That prophet…really great guy…or at least thats what our parents told us. He died right around the time of the apocalypse. He wrote up this manifesto that kind of explains everything about everything and if you don’t sign off then…um…yeah…the pit. The prophet felt really bad about it and says in the end it’s not his or anyone’s fault but those who refuse to sign. Doesn’t matter how much we like them. You see it’s all apart of how everything works and its what they have chosen for themselves.”

Of course the first thing you want to do after hearing this is run. Screw the Teslas and there are probably heavy metals in the chocolate. It’s back to fighting zombies.

Christianity is not alone in it’s stories of hell but at least the Buddhists allow you to be reborn out of hell eventually. The more I think of this I just feel like we are totally missing the larger point. However I don’t want to sound like I am in on this point but I feel like it is out there and it does not include eternal burning.

Humans all over the world under different races and creeds believe in different variations of heaven and hell. I have to believe these are apart of a larger poem that overlays our experience in the here and now that could not possibly be understood in concrete words and concepts. The words are just pointers to something else that we could never hope to describe. I think the words may have pointed to something different for ancient cultures than they do for some of us today which is maybe why heaven, hell and atonement drive me nuts?

I digress and remember that drive on PCH. I remember to let go of the words. Let go of the intellectual concepts that seem like spiritual legalese. I sense that words and concepts are not the intellectual currency of the eternal. Rather this invitation to let go and surrender feels like an opening or a contact point to that note that resolves the end of a melody.

I feel this as I submerge myself in this cold water. Throughout the swim I feel fear and have moments where I am afraid I will be overcome by the intensity of the cold. I let go into the cold and let myself completely fall into it and accept it. I can’t describe this process but it leads to metamorphosis. It is an emptying of my yearning for warmth that allows space for what the cold is and can do right now. It brings peace to my harried mind. I’m not in control and I realize that’s a good thing as Jesus offers his hand and asks me to join him on the water.