Tag Archives: joy

Returning home from a mini-retirement after a month abroad; or, a hard-learned lesson soaked in blood

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I sit at my computer in a pool of blood and around me are the relics of who I was before this mini-retirement.

To better preface, sometime over the 18 hours of traveling home, carrying mine and my wife’s backpack by foot, taxi and airplane, I tore a hemorrhoid I had develop in few days leading up to our flight home from Mexico.

Yes. Disgusting.

What’s more, my readers, is that the crust and congeal I feel beneath me is a quaint reminder. Of what, you ask?

That the way I was living before Mexico, before this mini-vacation, this mini-retirement, was a vain-foolish effort to push my hell-bent mania into being. And it took the food, people and countryside of another country to pop that sick way of living and leave me embarrassingly bloody.

My readers, this of course is not the most flattering topic to broach with you – but you too are pushing too hard. You are huffing and puffing, sweating even, to make your life into something – and for what?

More money? A nicer car? A larger place to live?

Abandoning the life I had here in the states has brought me to a profound sense of humility. I was sick, my readers, ill even, with the over-reaching ambition to make what I felt in my gut to be true a reality for all way too soon. And for what?

Another achieved accomplishment? A validated sense of self? A holier-than-thou spirit?

Aye… so much pushing and fighting, and now I am left with pain, remorse, and an opportunity to take the time to heal from who I was.

Slow down my friends, we all know that traditional retirement is a scam, that the pursuit of riches beyond measure doesn’t add up, and that the best things in life are free/cheap/abundant. Let the process unfold with you and enjoy every moment of it.

Or prepare to sit in the bloody mess of who you are.

Playing in the waves, over the abyss – a sunday revery on the ocean

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Audio recording of the post, ‘Playing in the waves, over the abyss – a sunday revery on the ocean’

Truthfully, the best part of visitng the beach is not the cool sand under the canopy, the ice-cold cervesas (beers), topless chicks sunning, or the salty gentle breeze. The best part of the beach is the endlessly thundering waves of the water.

For me, I have to get into the water. I simply have too. After years of swimming in pools competitively, the rip-roar of the tide calls to me. I am sure you can attest to the grandeur that the surf  commands as compared to the placid calm of a pool. And it is that greatness that I love. The rythmn that the water beats on the drum of the beach, it awakens me to play in it.

Of course I go out as far as I can, to where my feet can no longer touch the safety of the sandbar, that I float over the abyss. Looking into the darkness beneath me, lolling with the waves with only the strength of my limbs and the buoyancy of my body, this is where I love to find myself. In tune with the rythmn, uulating with the hum of the sea, pulsing with my own personal power – the power to overcome the depths beneath me. Here is where I truly play, where I let the crash of cresting waves and rushing riptides carry me back into the coastline.

And then I do it all over again, throwing my self into the waves, letting them fling me over their back like a father wrestling their son. Again, again and again I play in the waves. It seems silly to say, but I feel love emanate as I play in the waves that carry me. Not everyone can handle the rough-and-tumble play, and the waves of the ocean are not patient for those who can’t handle rough play. But for those who can handle the relentless nature, there is joy and laughter and exhaustion of all cares and worries.

This is my sunday revery, my sunday worship, to immortalize with my hands the eternal love of the sea.