This year's love

boundless and bounded love

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” shouted a surfer, squeezed by the comfort of a wetsuit, who hopped off his board into the water 20 feet away from me. 

I too wondered what the hell I was doing, as my body trembled and my teeth chattered violently from the winter chill. Silver water stung my bare skin red. He looked upon me with widened eyes that read concern and disbelief. 

There was the point of return - the point where waves swelled no higher than my knees. I waded here for a while. And then there was the point of no return - the point just before I fell backward into the wave that crested behind me when I laughed like a lunatic in complete surrender. 

LIVING, I shouted back giddily with conviction as strong as the current.  

He laughed too before paddling back towards the horizon. 

---

Just the morning prior I stepped out onto this beach for the first time. The rising tide washed inches then feet past its last embrace of the shore. Sunlit ivory sand filled the inside of my tennis shoes before I ditched them. I followed the ebbs and flows of the dry land until the next push of frothy white caps unexpectedly washed over my numb feet that scuffed along like cement blocks. My remaining warmth quilled away like the smoke of a blown-out candle. The shriek of a schoolgirl forced through my wind burnt lips that gave way to a smile that grew as swiftly as peonies in the spring. 

All I wanted was the warmth of a heat-blasted room but instead of walking back toward the grainy boardwalk, I faced the liquid silver ocean laced in gold sunlight and walked toward the edge of the world. 

The sting of a winter’s ocean drew numbness everywhere water lapped against me. My gray hiking pants two sizes too big, clung to me like saran wrap. With each step deeper my breath grew jagged until my grey shirt was also clinging to my goosebump-raised skin. 

When the icy sting reached my elbow, I couldn’t go any further. And with resistance muddled with exuberance, I sloshed out onto dry land like a mermaid pleading for the feeling of her legs to return. 

---

I’m not much of a beach person. I can’t stand the stickiness of wet sand and on most summer days I hide from the sun under thick canopied ridgelines. But that day, the wintery beach drew existential gratitude from me. As I slipped back into the comfort of dry clothes and crisp morning turned into a mid-day haze and mid-day turned into feathery darkness, I couldn’t stop thinking about those chilly currents. 

I wondered if anything is as boundless, as powerful, as life-giving as the water that rolled deeper and further than my mind gave permission to imagine. 

Tomorrow morning, I’ll go further, I told myself. 

---

It was the Eve of Christmas when I found myself standing shoulder deep engulfed in the bellowing vastness observed by the bewildered surfer. I tip-toed over rolling sand with my hands plastered to my bare pallid shoulders that were drawn tightly to my reddening ears. Couples bundled in puffy coats lined with exotic animal fur holding mittened hands dotted the shoreline. I could feel them staring at me as my arms and legs peaked through frothy crests with aliveness. Water sprayed like firecrackers every time my head burst above water desperate for even a tinge of warmth to fill my lungs. A smile remained painted across my red cheeks. I played with the spirited love of life only unbound children express. 

---

Eleven minutes is how long I lasted in the frigidness of crashing water, in the buoyancy of surrender before a headache from the cold and the complete numbness of my feet drew me back onto the sand. 

Those eleven minutes have clung to me like salt water on dry skin. In those moments as I was experiencing the enormity of the ocean, as I was experiencing what it means to be an insignificant blip in the earth’s undulations, a warm knowing pooled in my frozen fingertips that there is a source of boundlessness deeper and wider than even our earth’s seas. 

Love. 

I knew by the unshatterable aliveness that surged through my whole body that love must be even more vast than the seas - its depths and its potency unmeasurable like ocean floors by sonar. 

Though not all love is boundless. I can feel the difference between boundless and bounded love like the difference between bobbing in a shallow lake and being consumed by an entire ocean. I can feel it in my fingertips and with every breath. Boundless love cannot fathom containment. Bounded love feels holdable between two arms. 

I think the sensation I felt in the ocean that morning - velvety warmth cascading from the center of my chest drawing every nerve in my body into aliveness that bordered rapture - was love. It was love - the boundless kind - that gave way to full surrender. The kind that permits life to be experienced in full color. In full vibrancy. 

My hope for you -for everyone - is that you are at some point ravenous with love for this life. That your reverence for the current moment permeates every relationship you hold, as refreshing and life-giving as bitter waves on a winter morning. 

My hope for myself, in this new year, is that I choose to walk through the waters of discomfort in full surrender. To transcend bounded love. To watch it flow beyond what can be contained.

---

My dear thanks to

Camilo Moreno-Salamanca

,

Tommy Dixon

, and

Rick Lewis

for their contributions and support.

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Have a wonderful weekend and see you here next week!