Vancouver Island, 1994

Long Beach, on Vancouver Island. 1994.

Opposite side of the island from my parents' house, which was right on the beach. That was my mother's deal. She loved the ocean. My stepfather was a prairie boy and hated both the ocean and all the trees. He preferred a flat and endless stretch of wheat fields.

My mother said that when she died she didn't want any sort of a big fuss with a lot of people. She just wanted her immediate family to wade into the ocean she could see from her porch and quietly scatter her ashes there. So that's what we did.

A day or two later I took a solo trip across the island.

Long Beach was a place I remembered visiting when I was about 12. I remembered it was cold, desolate, and really beautiful. I also remembered that hippies had built all sorts of shelters out of the driftwood.

It hadn't changed much from my memories as a kid in the early 70s. It was still desolate, beautiful, and the only signs of humans were odd bits of hippie detritus.

Miles of beach, middle of August, and I was the only person there.

Zuma March 21 2009

This week's beach update splits between two weekends. The idea here is to try to convey what this experience is like for me...which is not about a bunch of macho young man's stuff in which one tames a wave and conquers nature and engages in Xtreme anything...it's more about the fact that you cannot conquer nature, you cannot will the ocean to do anything, it's not listening to you and really doesn't even know you're there. it's about some sort of sense of one-ness with the whole thing. It's sort of easy to get that feeling of serene awe when you are sitting on a board in the ocean with the dolphins swimming not so far beyond you, storm clouds building over the mountains...

It's like the Buddhist mindfulness/Vipasanna meditation, which is a meditation not of blissed out, what's-up-with-my-naval escapism, but of focus, concentration on specific aspects of the immediate here-and-now.


My board, Zuma, March 14, 2009


Tere, Zuma, March 21, 2009

New Years Superstitions, karma, & the crabby lady with no chin who always gives me the evil eye

The corner store opened late today (new years day), and I was the first customer. This pleased Terri, the Armenian lady who runs it and has become a sort of surrogate mother to me. I am one of her favorite people, so my being the first person in the door was a very good omen. However, I was there to buy Theraflu since I've been sick as a dog for the past 4 days, and having your first customer be sick is not such a good omen. So she made me wait until someone else came in and bought something, which was okay since it's beautiful sunny and warm outside and I've barely been out of the house since Friday.

A few minutes later, the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye came in and bought a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi, and then it was cool to sell me the Theraflu.

What I liked about this exchange was the implication that our lives affect one another in myriad ways. The bigger the city, the greater the sense of disconnection, isolation and insignificance, so an exchange like this that emphasizes the connections between us all becomes a wonderful way for me to start the new year. From Terri's viewpoint, it's superstition that she's adhering to. For me, it's something vaguely eastern about the connections between everything. And for the first time ever (as far as I am aware), the crabby-lady-with-no-chin-who-always-gives-me-the-evil-eye had a beneficial effect, 'cause her appearance allowed me to buy the Theraflu and come back to my apartment where I will probably spend the rest of the day alternating between reading Brad Warner's "Sit Down and Shut Up: punk rock commentaries on Buddha, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye" and Ross McDonald's "The Way Some People Die", both of which, so far, are awesome books.