Only a Surfer Knows the Feeling

Liquid energy rolling across enormous distances, virtually unimpeded until a final expenditure and release of force upon the sands of the shoreline; the eternal stampeding of wild white horses.  These immense frequency oscillations nestle themselves into masses of liquid.  Swells roaming the oceans and seas of our world, gathering their watery life force; the ‘wind swells’ from distant storms or blowing fronts, and powerfully birthed ‘ground swells’ from movements of underwater land masses.  The energy structured in the seemingly infinite molecules making up the seas, moving forward from oceanic horizon where a watery line meets its sky. 

It is true; only a surfer knows the feeling.  It is one of supreme comfort, a moment of living in the Now, riding the moving hills or the colossal mountainside faces of waves.  Waves – truly alive like nothing else on the earth.  Powerful.  Beautiful.  Completely silent until the release of energy slams down on the beach shallows.  The surfer accelerates as the breaking wave pulls water from the shoreline, racing over the shallows back out to sea, in an effort to sustain its compacting energy.  The force embodied in the elemental begins folding over on itself as it rolls over the increasingly shallow ocean bottom; the sandy bottom creating a drag on the lower frequency oscillation of the wave while the higher oscillation is free to keep its momentum.  The liquid – bound to the laws of physics – begins losing its ability to contain the energy.  The wave frequency is being ripped apart.  Movement.  Compression.  Energy releasing through the water as it violently impacts back onto itself.  This releasing of energy generates numerous powerful underwater vortexes as the wave thunders down upon itself in an immediate need to dissipate the chaotic release of energy.  Underwater turbulence.  Physical.  Powerful.  Violent. 

The surfer rides the structured wave form, its energy releasing as a constant white-water explosion chasing the surfer from behind.  The process of being enveloped inside a living liquid vortex of nature is a lesson in Zen, a lesson in Tao.  A timeless passage of right.  All structures and concepts of time are impossibly compressed.  All past memories, all of the plans or worries of the future are but transitory illusions from living in our societies.  All unimportant now.  The wave is transforming energy through the immediate surroundings, and the surfer’s awareness is fixed on that dynamic wall of water. 

The moment of getting ‘barreled’ – if you let me slip into my native tongue – is a moment of existing as one with the universe.  It is a region in the Now, immobile yet accelerating.  A region of polar duality.  The center of the vortex.   The surfer has arrived, both internally and externally, to a state of rigpa.  Rigpa is a state of being that does not reside in a particular place for it is always moving, forever in motion.  Changing.  It is the form of perfection.  And yet there is always a center point.  Dualism has not been separated; it has been built upon and transcended by the correct placement of consciousness obtained through the awareness and actions of a conscious mind and body.  The surfer need not move.  The surfer is in a state of supreme grace perfectly balanced inside the paradoxical universal serenity of structured wave stability and its violent structural collapse.  A universe formed and living through the antithema of polarity.  There is no thought.  There is no sound.  There is vast movement though the surfer’s mind and body are still.  Their work is done; they have placed an individual consciousness in the proper place in time and space.  There is only the Now.  It is a successful merging of body, mind and wave energy.  The Now is being expressed as existing one with nature, of being a culmination of many energies manifesting as one entity immersed in a natural vortex, the end stage of the wave, a tunnel of air wrapped with energy imbued liquid.   Accelerating to a close… Right before our eyes.