Winter Abandon

Today I watched a young man fling himself into the winter ocean with abandon (in his yellow y-front underwear). The ocean is roughed up, uninviting. He lands back first, disappears under the waves. Who was that? I say out loud to the dogs.

I want be the one to fling myself into the ocean with abandon, in winter, barely clothed, people turning their heads to say, who is that? I want to be the one to do it, even if there is no one there to see.

I try to let go of self judgement and just appreciate being witness to the moment, but it’s a hard habit to break. Today is 24 days without vaping, zero days without self judgement.

I remember the who is that feeling from when I first moved here, when no one knew who I was, and I hardly knew anyone. I could feel people thinking it at me as I was thinking it at them. Meeting anyone then was greeting a mystery, two mysteries briefly touching.

Moving somewhere makes your life feel overtly mysterious for a time, until the new people and place are integrated into your life and your framework of meaning, but the truth is, just being alive at all is a grand mystery. Don’t forget.

I think I want cold water because it wakes me up, jolts me from the day dream of life just streaming by. It hurts, briefly, but overall cold water is pleasure, delight, awakeness, the self activated and alive. I want to be overtly alive, to turn heads in my being overtly alive, and inspire that being in turn, until we’re all just beings dipping in and out of cold water freezing but alive and squealing with joy and giggling at each other’s underwear (I haven’t seen y-fronts since my dad and my first boyfriend out of high school. And yellow ones!).

—

Here’s a photo of me at sixteen jumping off a cliff in the Los Padres National Forest, not quite with wild abandon, rather on fire with self-consciousness, wishing to be as adult and casually cool as the Californians also swimming and cliff-jumping.