the dharma blog

I spend the whole afternoon on my surfboard. I’m not very good yet, but good enough that it’s a riot. And the waves are just right. Big enough to give me a good ride, but not intimidating. It’s a hot day, too, so it’s great being in the water.

Everyone else spends the day swimming or sitting in Aridondack chairs in the surf, or eating under the umbrella.

The sun is setting now and I’m laying on my back on my board watching it go down. The water has calmed and there are no real waves now. Just rollers that send me up and down against the atmosphere.

My dad told me that the thing he missed most living in Madison was the ocean. He missed having the ocean nearby. When he left California in 1972 he said there were more radicals in Madison than in Haight-Ashbury. More bookstores in Wisconsin than in California.

But, a long way from the ocean.

I won’t make that same mistake, I tell myself. There’s nothing here to distract me from my thoughts and the horizon.

The sun slowly hits the haze line a couple degrees from the true horizon and then disappears behind it. The temperature drops quickly and I paddle slowly into the beach where a fire is already burning.

Honey is by the fire with everybody else. She stands and kisses me when I walk up.

Are you hungry, she asks.

Starving.

She unpacks a backpack full of food and utensils. There’s even nice metal hot dog sticks. That’s the kind of person she is, she thinks of things like that, realizes how good life can be. She makes mine that good.

There’s cold beer in the cooler I lugged down here. Cold beer is even better than metal hot dog sticks.

He also told me once that you reach a certain point in life and you start feeling your regrets. A recurring sensation of going the wrong way down a one-way street. And you try to remember all the turns you’ve taken and each one could have been the one. He told me to pay attention to every turn.

Soon it’s completely dark and the five of us withdraw further into the sphere of the firelight.