Perfect

Another late swim today. Leaving at 1:00 and it is a brand new day. The sun has been shining all morning. I almost thought I had lost my window of opportunity when some clouds started to accrue around noon but while some haze lingers, it is mostly sunny as I leave and I don’t see any of that billowy nonsense hovering over the coast.

There are good vibes in the air all the way to the beach. The shore is bustling with everyone else who thought it would be a good idea to come down here and by the looks of things, they are correct.

I walk by the lifeguard stand and I’m curious if they are going to copy Surfline’s 61 degree water temperature reading. It is hard to tell if the number on the board here is 65 or 66 but I’m glad to see some original thought has been put into this. Even if that is all it is - thought. Apparently yesterday’s dip in temps made a strong impression on someone at Surfline. I don’t know where 61 came from. That seems extreme and wasn’t close to any buoy stat I saw.

I put my feet in the water and I can immediately tell a difference between now and yesterday morning. We have definitely recovered a good bit. It’s not as bath-like as last week but my feet don’t ache with the cold. The sun is shining on the water and I’m feeling confident that this swim will feel just as much as summer as it looks.

I head into the water and start to swim south and there is no question that we have a fresh new shipment of water serving up a whole different temperature than what we had yesterday. I don’t feel a single drop of 61 degree water over the entire swim. 61? I’d say even 65 or 66 is a bit scarce. I’m going to say 68 or higher.

The water and sun and all the sand and rock that I can see for as far as I can see it look as though they are just as they should be and are reaching for their full potential and achieving it. I stop once or twice along the way to the south end and take this perfection all in. Look at that cliff and how it contrasts against the plane of blue water that expands to forever - perfect. Oddly, even my goggles are working perfectly today. They don’t leak the entire swim. Why is this? I have no idea.

I’m letting everything shed itself into the water. All my ideas of what should and should not be. I’m thinking of the sermon I sat through yesterday at church and how it made me feel disconnected from the ground of all being that I feel right here. I just don’t relate with this obsession around sin and needing to be cleansed of sin and this idea that there is this tribe of people of Christian faith that are less likely to sin and the longer you have been in the tribe the less you sin and those outside of the tribe are given to indulge in sin more. It just doesn’t jive with what I see in the world.

As I swim here, I think of how here in this ocean, there is no sin and no sinner. I am here and I am surrounded in this body of water. Right here and right now there is just me in an endless ocean beneath a sky of light. I can feel the water move against my skin and the fact that I am one thing and the water is another is simply a matter of view point of which there are so many. Whatever my current point of view or perspective might be, right here, right now, everything is perfect and just as it should be.

Sure, eventually I will leave the water and start interacting with other people and then the perfection quickly becomes obscured and the lines of separation between this and that become more pronounced. Thankfully, I have not yet left the water. I will cherish this thought for as long as I possibly can. In the ocean, I swim and think of everything there is right here and all around me for as far as I can imagine and it is all complete and whole.

The entire swim is great. The south to north leg felt like it took a really long time and somehow I drifted quite a ways out even though I seemed to be constantly pointed in the right direction. Not a problem. Here I am now safely on shore.

The swim ended more cloudy than it started but still with plenty of sunlight. There was a small army of jr. lifeguards heading up the stairs just as I was. Things got real at the shower and I had to get assertive as youngsters just stood and stared at the nozzles in a state of indecision as to whether the effort to press the button was worth the result of getting wet. Kids these days.