On the summer solstice and supermoon weekend, we met Michael Willis, gentleman farmer surfing sadhu who generously gave us three avocados (one for B, one for Z, one for me) from his farm and a CD of pretty cool psychedelic music that put the baby to sleep in the car. Namaste!
Yes, I disappeared down the rabbit hole for a while. Last March, I found out I was pregnant and as spring turned into summer, blogging didn’t seem to fit into the schedule anymore once I hit my second trimester. I was still surfing. It was my mental clarity as always, but increasingly it became a personal statement, a proverbial finger to folks who thought it was too dangerous, too this or too that. With the help of Google I found a few ladies in Hawaii who continued to surf throughout their pregnancies: Among them, Heather of Mama Surfs, who inspired me to keep surfing with the Big Bump. One serendipitous day at Malibu, I was catching a few waves when Brian Asher took this shot. I am super grateful he caught this moment with Zander in my belly. As without, so within. The membranes that separated me from baby seemed a lot more permeable when I was on the surface of the ocean.
“Each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb…” — Rachel Carson
“Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.
He built boats to venture out on its surface. Later he found ways to descend to the shallow parts of its floor, carrying with him the air that, as a land mammal long unaccustomed to aquatic life, he needed to breathe. Moving in fascination over the deep sea he could not enter, he found ways to probe its depths, he let down nets to capture its life, he invented mechanical eyes and ears that would re-create for his senses a world long lost, but a world that, in the deepest part of his subconscious mind, he had never wholly forgotten.
And yet he has returned to this mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents. In the artificial world of his cities and towns, he often forgets the true nature of his planet and long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time. The sense of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon, ridged and furrowed by waves; when at night he becomes aware of the earth’s rotation as the stars pass overhead; or when, alone in this world of water and sky, he feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea.”
— Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
Katavision 