6.

I started surfing again. Every day actually, since leaving the mountains a couple of weeks back. 

I’ve been trailering my horses to the mountains every spring for the last five years, staying the summer and fall, and bringing them south when the snow began to fly. And that’s where I am now, at this beat-down house I found near the coast, on enough land to support the horses. 

I’m going to start working on the house with what’s left of the summer. It’s not that beat-down, I guess. Just needs love.

The waves have been big the last few mornings, and sometimes the violence of the water is kind of overwhelming. If I fall, I become a fly in an industrial washing machine, dunked and drowned and tossed around by a power much greater than myself. But the grace of the water is overwhelming, too, as I ride this energy that has traveled thousands of miles through the ocean, before finally spreading its fingers in the rivulets of sand.

One can’t exist without the other, of course. Violence below allows grace above. And if I fall, I’m quickly reminded that the violence is always just beneath the surface. 

So I try not to fall. I try just to ride the wave. 

My mom is riding her own wave. And there’s violence below the surface, for sure. Not physical violence, but emotional turbulence that explodes into anger or sadness, sometimes for no clear reason. But in the week before I left the mountains, I noticed she wasn’t holding on to that anger or sadness quite as long. I mean, she was still getting really pissed and upset throughout the day, but she’d forget what made her angry or sad pretty quickly and move on. I wish I could forget that easily sometimes. 

But we don’t have to talk about that now. 

I’m going to get in the ocean again before sunset.