The day started soft and strange. I heard my $10 target anti-phone-in-room stubborn substitutionary alarm, and didn’t believe the time it said. half-dreaming it broke (it couldn’t be almost eleven), i pulled the sheep-shadowed blanket’s white smoothness closer to my check to keep the frigid huntington beach winter air away from my face.

I: unusually tired, dichotomously unusually ready for the day.

Sabbath, this was my first official. Corresponding with the first friday in january, that New Years resolution alignment wasn't actually intentional. I’d been to the beach about two months earlier, carried there when my feet had carried me up out of my chair up into the restroom up out of the church office up into my car while panic rose up up up up and I needed to take myself someplace where I could come down. 

That beach then has resolved in a big breaking. a breaking of my strength to keep holding it all, a breaking of trying to figure it all out, a breaking of perpetually breaking. I’d been there before, and that was what bothered me maybe most. I’d hold onto what was inside and swell up and explode and deaden out and walk through mud and hope for light and start holding on again and swell up and explode and deaden out and walk through mud and hope for light and start holding on again and swell explode deaded 

cycle cyclic spiral circle 

here me now, hear me now, i can’t.

And this time I really couldn’t. I left that whole foods parking lot with a part of me in pieces that I was done trying to sort and done trying to surrender the need for sorting. It was just kind of a deep soul shrug, seemingly a casual movement that was anything but. A casual movement that was the result of a colossal shift fought for years on. It didn't seem like a choice i’d made. It was as if the inevitable had caught up to me, that it was this choice or nothing, that i was left looking at the pieces of my life as a ripple that was still exploding and I was… okay. okay that the chaos had erupted again. So cataclysmic inside my mind that the explosion led to a kind of stillness that i knew deep-pained-in was meant to be explored-humbly than attacked urgent-rationally. 

I bought a beach pass today.

It was the last act before intermission of my sabbath, my time to slow down and feel the world, find the wonder, stop and rest and ask what rest means for humanness.

Infiniti window rolled down, I asked green-clad pixie cut ranger if annual passes were available and if they were available here. 

She said yes, and seemed to scramble to get my card and hand me the clipboard quicker than I’d have time to change my mind.

I thought it was funny.

I soon rolled past sand clad parking marks towards the end with me and a white van and two bikers and one runner, the only ones brave enough to feel the “cold” on a middle of winter beach sunset night.

You couldn't even really see the sun setting, or the sky being painted with the setting’s reverberating echo. But it didn’t matter to me. I walked, clad in all black and sperry’s boots that don’t fit the californian labels, post changing in the back of a warehouse parking lot after leaving the downtown of i-belonged-dont-belong comfort of santa ana. 

The beach pass was a simple decision, really

Something that’s become clear in the inevitable.

My soul needs it, and I want to hear my soul.

The water,

it is as a vast untouchable un-fully-knowable force that moves whether I see it or not, that crashes uncontrolled by my finiteness, that’s depths we don’t know, that’s vastness coats more of this earth’s crusts than we care to see, can see, even if we long to or don’t want to see and or believe. 

It comforts me.

I feel small.

And I like that.

Its magnanimity makes me afraid, the good kind.

Its depths I don’t even know how to begin to understand, the wonder-filled kind.

Its waves I don’t know how to ride, the let-go kind.

Its vastness casts onto me the out of control, the controlled kind.

And I like that.

I bought a beach pass today.

Maybe its a pass to my inability, the comforting kind.