The Beach at Linda Mar

Have you ever, slowly, learned to love something that you were afraid of?
As if you woke up from a scary dream and realized that the fear in the dream was gone and the reality of being awake was  beautiful?

... and when you walk closer to the edge of the relentless, noisy tide of this fear someone runs passed you and dives into the waters as if their life was determined to destroy itself...

and they disappear into the unfathomable water.

And you say, "How could they do that?"
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Beaches always bring me thoughts of mortality.
It happen one summer. I was on vacation with my aunt and cousin, in the late 50's, in southern Calilfornia. There was  a diving platform that was held by a rope out beyond the surf at the La Jolla Beach and Country Club that some wealthy relative belonged to. It was a hot day and the water looked so good. My cousin, being older and a much stronger swimmer decided that we should swim out to this platform so that we could mingle with the rich kids.
She reached the platform before I did. I was swimming slowly out over the waves and into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, knowing full well that I shouldn't be out there. I had never swam in the ocean before and was not a good swimmer at all. I was a floater in swimming pools, a pretender... a dive down and swim under the water, with goggles on, and see the bottom of the pool kind of swimmer. I didn't know how to breath properly or use the right kind of strokes. I should not have been swimming in the ocean.
This was not a swimming pool and there was no "bottom" that I could see or feel. My mind played this game of watery vertigo with me. The warm and cold currents clutched my fear like fish touching my body as I tried to keep swimming into the waves of water that would sometimes block my view of the platform ahead.
Then I saw my cousin swimming past me in the opposite direction toward the beach. She said something about a dead seagull floating in the water, blood and the attraction of sharks for that sort of thing.  I froze.
I knew, at any moment, a shark was going to find me flailing about like that dead bird and I would feel this huge monster grab my leg.
I turned around and with all the effort that my thirteen year old body could muster, I swam for shore but my breathing was impaired and my strokes were immature. I was "in over my head". The old saying  finally took on an urgent and stark reality I had never understood before.
As I tried to swim.. as my face went into the water and filled my nose with salty liquid, I noticed, for the first time,  that I was swimming right next to the heavy rope that was tethering the diving platform. I grabbed the rope and pulled myself into shore with the certainty that if that rope had not been there I would have been eaten by this unseen shark or drowned from fear alone.
I will never forget the feeling of sand under my feet and the warmth of the sun when I reached the beach and lay there shaking from panic and the horror of being so hopelessly left to fend for myself in an ocean so vast that there was no hope of anyone finding my body until it was swepted onto a distant beach and someone would be running to me screaming "Oh my God!".... Flipping me over, as in the movies, they would find me missing a leg and covered with seaweed. The awful phone call that would have been made to my parents... the cousin who would have been blamed for letting me swim out there.. because she was older... because she was suppose to be with me. It was a  tragedy that never happen, of course, because of a ROPE.... but the memory has never left me.
I NEVER WENT INTO THE OCEAN AGAIN.
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So when, on this beach, last week, I watched my sister pick up a stranded crab

, walk out to the serf and return it to the water...

and how the crab greatfully seemed to move into the ebb and flow of the surf and become a part of this vast sea. It's home...

.. and how beautiful it looked in it's marine environment.
I looked at the delicate flowers that grow in the sand dunes...

and felt the winds that shape the trees...

I watched my sister stand for long periods of time and looks out toward the horizon... smiling, relaxing, rejuvinating... and walking too close to the foamy water.

I wanted to tell her not to go in too far, but I didn't.  I even walked down closer to the sand that holds reflections... the sand that is so filled with water that it mirrored her feet and the sky above. This is what I needed to see. Not the ocean of fear that almost took my life so many years ago. I needed to see the ocean that reflects the sky and the life that lives around it. I think I'm coming closer to seeing this vast childhood monster as a life giving sea of endless resources, not only for the creatures that live in it, but the beings that come to find solace beside it.
I have never been close enough to see my reflection in the wet sand. It's a reflection of life that I hope to see someday. Maybe I will stand there the next time I'm at the beach and see my own likeness in the mirrored sand.... and maybe I will let the white foam move over my bare feet and once again feel that strange sensation I remember as a child, of going backwards and forward at the same time.... being pulled into and away from the shore....and have no fear.
I'm still afraid of the ocean.... but I'm learning that not all monsters are bad. Some are just misunderstood. If you watch someone who loves something long enough, as my sister loves the ocean, you understand what William Wordsworth said when he wrote....

"...Thanks to the Human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Ode~intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood~