West Coast Mamma

A few days ago, I landed on beach in San Diego.  There is a very distinct feeling you get when you decide on the spot you want to put your stuff down.  Like claiming a territory and planting a flag, we let the beach chairs roll off our shoulders and plunked our bags into the sand.  I have not had a beach day in a while.  This one is a pre-spring late afternoon one.  Warm enough to feel the sun get hot on your face but not warm enough to take off your light sweatshirt, unless of course you are a young girl laying low below the breeze in a bikini or a young man fired up to be noticed throwing a frisbee.I am visiting Jack who lives here but he is not with us today, he is off playing golf with Scott.  I have Luica here though and it is the first time we have seen each other since Christmas.  I am grateful for facetime and that it offers me so much in the in between time but there is nothing like taking her small hand in mine and feeling the magnetic pulse of her fiery and present soul.  I mention to her that if you were to blindfold me and just have me sniff the hair of each of my kids that I could tell you which was which and how many days they have gone without washing their hair.  “I bet you can.” She says as she adjusts her seat to sit back in her chair.

I try not to miss my kids too much but the first few hours of seeing them in the flesh again feels very tender for me, like I have been fooling myself into believing that phone calls are enough.

I can feel her independence and strength fall away after a while and she feels small again instead of mighty.  I realize that I should have gotten on a plane to see Lucia earlier.  That I missed something, and that I should have been there for her more in person.  Of course, she disagrees.  She is fine and she assures me that I am always there for her.  We chat and catch up and show each other pictures.  We even repeat some of the stories we shared over the phone because now we can animate them and feel them and process the energy of them together. I share about my recent encounter swimming with dolphins in the wild, how I met a Humpback whale and it showed me her baby as proud mammas who trust you do.  Lucia shares with me her insights about her trip to Japan, her plans to possibly travel to New Zealand next. At some point we both fill up with tears.  It is just what happens when you are alive and sensitive and love and don’t miss much.  We are two alchemists on the beach with the wind and the vast space of the ocean before us and we are using it all to help us break things down and put them back together again.  Women are always doing that.  Taking things down and building them back up.  That is why we need to be near the ocean, though any body of water will do.

At some point, I get really sleepy, and Lucia seems to as well.  I slide from the beach chair onto a big towel and lay on my belly with one knee bent to the side.  I wiggle my bumps and curves into the sand, molding my body into the earth.  Sand is so good for pulling you in, making room, and reminding you that you belong on the earth and should return daily.  I like to think Pachamama is shifting her great body around me and tucking me in the way I still coax my kids to lay between Scott and me in our big king-size bed for a snuggle.  I feel the pulse of this California version of the mother’s breath under me.  Once, after being in ceremony in a sweat lodge, the shaman had us all lay belly down on the earth in the forest.  Then he told us to empty all our breath and wait till the earth breathed us.  With a bit of practice I could feel the inhale and exhale of the lungs of the great forest all around me. Soon I was timing my breath with all of nature which easily does this all day and every day because it knows that there is only one body, one breath.  I do this now and hear deep in sand a thunderous bang.  After a pause, I hear another thunderous bang.  I lifted my head up and don’t hear it at all. Then, I place my ear down again to listen for it once again.  The earth is taking a pounding from the giant waves, like the great skin of a drum.  The beach is a pulsing breath and beat.  Boom! …Boom! …Boom!… AHHHH!  This is why it is easy to nap on the beach.  Rarely do we climb into the lap of the mother and fall into her tribal beat, let her breath fill us, and empty us out over and over again.  The beach is designed to lull us back to her infinite breath and power.  “Let”, the tide rolls in,  “go”, the rolls out… “let”, the tide rolls in,  “go”, the tide rolls out…

I shift my belly and knees to give my other side a chance to twist and release.  I am sore and tired from traveling and early morning pickle ball.  I let my body rest as it adjusts to the time change, daylight savings and shift in temperature.  It is a lazy vacation tired.  A sweet kind of resetting of my pace.  My mind is slowing down and I can tell because I begin to have beautiful thoughts that I should write down before they are pulled out by the tide.   Suddenly, with a little shift in the wind, a blast of sunscreen and a high-pitched girl in a bikini laugh, I feel like a teenager again at our family beach house in Jersey.

As a family, we were hard-core beachgoers, setting up camp on the beach early in the morning and then going back and forth to the house only when needed for snacks and bathroom breaks.  Sometimes, when my sister and I were in high school, we were allowed to bring our boyfriends with us to the beach.  My mother’s instincts on high would notice we were missing and send one of my two younger siblings to check on us, interrupt us, catch us, and send us back to the beach.  “Mom wants you to come back to the beach now!”  “ Shut up,…get out of here!” We would yell back. It is so hard to stop kissing when every kiss may be your last.  For a moment, I can still taste those salty teenage stolen kisses.

Often, my family would end up at the beach late into the early evening, pulling on sweatshirts and wrapping big blankets around our sunburned bodies.  There was this same quality here today at the beach.  The simplicity of a beach nap, the sound of people laughing and chatting. The chill in the air. The sun is falling past the 4:00 mark, people are calling their dogs back to their leash, and the pounding of the waves seems even louder now that people are leaving and taking their tired kids with them.

I drift off for a bit and come out of a lucid dream where I am floating deep in the ocean underwater, gazing into the eye of a sperm whale.  I wake up and sit up to gaze for signs of blowholes, though I know it is not the season here.  Always I feel the sonar of cetaceans.  Slowly, I climb back up onto my beach chair and chug a little water while watching Lucia meditate with big earphones on her head and hands in a mudra.  Lucia plans to go to Ecuador this May to a special retreat to do plant medicine and hike the Andes with friends.  I ask her if she would like to hear how I prepare for ceremony and with a nod, I instruct her to write a letter to Pachamama before her ceremony.  I tell her to thank the earth for all she has given her.  Thank her for the high snowcapped mountain peaks that her sleek snowboard glides over with ease and power.  Thank her for the Hawaiian waterfalls she has surrendered under. Thank her for the big Moab night sky littered with stars and lightships and for the Colorado Lake she visits daily to meditate.  I told her to ask the great mother to reveal to her the gifts of her soul and her purpose for being here.  I suggested she ask the mother to tell her about her soul’s birth story and any wisdom she needs to download now to prepare for the next part of her incredible life.  Then I shared with her the prayer I learned before going into ceremony, into the ocean, into the forest, onto any hallowed ground,  “Show me, teach me, heal me.”  She says she will write it all out, and I believe her.  Making the connection with gratitude and consciousness before entering ceremony has made all the difference for my personal journeying.  For me, plant medicine without a shaman or ceremony or intention is like walking blindly off the trail into the forest with no supplies vs staying on a trail with clear markers and experience guides.  You can get very lost in tripping, or you can go right smack into the heart of love.

And that is where I find myself this week.  Right in the smack of love.  Time with all three of my kids, a relaxed Scott, the big ocean calling me to be still and breathe into miles of mystery and vastness.  Sometimes, I write a letter to Pachamama for no reason at all.  This is one.  I want my words of gratitude to pound into her sensitive, generous, teeming, majestic skin.  I want her to know I have emptied my lungs of the world for a few days and wish to breathe in her California vibe, her West Coast Pacific beat. ”

Taken from Bonnietarantinio.com
Sent from my iPhone