Where the mind goes

I know there will be a sunrise somewhere above this marine layer when it’s time for such things.

  For now I walk in my secret bubble: 100 feet of visible space on a steep dirt trail leading up through dusty green sage brush. I pause to tighten my laces, one foot up on a metal railing that has no other obvious purpose for being here. A rustling like sheets of sandpaper colliding precedes the life form that has suddenly penetrated my bubble: a woman wrapped in an inflated silver space blanket floats down the trail towards me like a misplaced pan of jiffy-pop popcorn transported through space atop black spandex leggings and hiking boots.

 Her shoes shuffle. I’m thinking she must be tired, returning from a pre-dawn journey to her space ship parked on a side street. But I watch in silence as she taps the pole where my foot still resides, turns and walks back up the path to join another woman barely visible just outside the gray mist. As I start up the same trail, passing this duo, the companion, dressed in red and black horizontal stripes, adjusts her ear buds, allowing muffled accordion music to escape.

My lungs dig deep for extra oxygen as I hurry to put them behind me, return them to the outskirts of the bubble. My mind surges forward to focus on the steepening slope before me. I have a friend who rides a bike up this hill, I remind myself, urging my legs to compensate while I coax my lungs to rise to the occasion.

  This same marine layer sensory isolation bubble wraps itself around me at dawn the next morning in the surf zone. It is the first day of a much-anticipated swell radiating from a New Zealand storm. Beyond the cool fog I can hear the waves break at the point, well out of sight. But I can faintly make out a ghostly surge throwing itself against the outer wall of the caves, scattering cliff-dwelling cormorants. Then the eery silence as I wait for the remnants to reach the sand bars beneath me at the shoreline.

  Back at the center, my center, in this isolated moment, the waves are perfect: steep peaks with enough power behind them one stroke sets me on the face for long, carving rides. Here on the edge of one million urban residents, I share this space in time with three adult leopard sharks. What came before and what has not yet arrived are outside the marine layer, outside our perfect center, outside this moment. When we are completely present, we are reminded of what truly matters. I may be here a minute, maybe an hour; it could be all day. But the gift of this perfect breath in rhythm with this ocean, and with the Earth the previous day, I will carry for a lifetime.

It is still with me the next morning: plunging on my bicycle down a hill that I am not sure I can ride back up. That same sensory cocoon is training my focus on the flotsam and jetsam in the bike lane just ahead of me. Wherever my mind might wander outside this cool grey cloak, outside this moment, it has learned to find its way back home again.