All Our Waves Are Water

by Jaimal Yogis

  I liked to think I was on a super-vertical wave. The reality was that I think this peak went easy on me. But I stayed centered, slid down the face, and rather than my usual high-line, I let myself get the full speed, drawing out a bottom turn on the flats. As the wall rolled right, it began to bend like a bow ready to unleash. This usually signals the wave is going to pitch hard—in other words, tube. But rather than trying to dig in a rail and go for the glory, I let the turn project me forward with its centripetal force. It thrust me easily ahead of the lip. Before I knew it, I was going too fast.

  Had I slowed myself with a quick turn, I might have gotten the barrel of my life. But enjoying the speed, I just let the wave take me to its end and sped off the back.

  I hooted, then paddled back, grinning at this first success. But I’ve noticed something over the years from all this surfing, talking with surfers, and writing about surfing. Our first wave is often, but not always, our best wave. And this is because we greet it with the fewest assumptions. After that, we are tainted by success or failure and by how identity collapses around each.

  Moments later, a green wall, around house-high, appeared on the horizon. It was an outsider, bigger than the set that had just come through. And now I was seeing through the lens of expecting success. A dangerous lens.

  I raced for the outside. I dug, heaved, sprinted, and actually made it out far enough to duck barely under the first explosion. But as the next wave warped, ready to plunge, I found myself in an interesting position with three options. I could either

  try to paddle over the wave, a choice in which I might flip over backward with the lip;

  leap off my board and swim down—the practical option with little glory; or

  turn and try a late, potentially heroic takeoff.

  The wave sucked me up. And though I could feel myself regretting it, emboldened by the previous ride, I went for option C. I turned and popped, a sort of no-paddle takeoff I’d seen pros do in movies. But as I stood, it quickly became apparent that there was no water beneath me. The wave had sucked its gut in. There was nothing beneath me but air. Lots. I fell for quite some time. And then, like a sledgehammer coming down on a thin nail, the lip drove me, rigid, into my board.

  All was muddy, brown, and confused as the sea stirred me into a stew. I didn’t seem to be hurt and was glad for that. But I was down long enough to miss breathing. And when I finally surfaced, gasping, I saw Eduardo’s board—half of it anyway. The rest was gone.

  “Mother—” I shouted, but before I could finish swearing, I had to dive down to avoid the wrath of the next few waves. When that was over, having been spun underwater, defeated psychologically and physically, I flailed in as best I could.

  On the beach, I unhooked my leash and looked at the half a board I’d spent much of my money on. When still whole, the board was worth more than I had in my bank account. This thought alone deflated me. But as I proceeded to whine my way up the sand to the dirt road, passing gaggles of surfers waxing up excitedly, I noticed one of them was Angela.

  Siri and I had become acquainted with Angela, a mother of two teenage boys, through her inn and restaurant. She was the only woman I’d seen surf Puerto big, and she did it well. Angela didn’t look much over twenty-five because surfing, she’d told us, was the fountain of youth. But she also seemed to have a wisdom beyond her years.

  Angela saw my board and gave a knowing smile. “We’ve got some boards you can borrow if you need one,” she said. Then she sprinted into the foam.

  I watched Angela disappear under a wave, remembering the real accidents that happened here—broken necks and spines and heads. I had no reason to complain. William Blake popped to mind:

  He who binds himself to a joy

  Does the winged life destroy;

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

  I also thought of what Siri had said the night before: aversion to the elite—be it surfing or art or writing or politics—was the same trap as chasing the elite. They were both attempts to identify solely as a tribe—always in juxtaposition to the other—rather than seeing ourselves as nuanced individuals who are all part of the human tribe, and crossing between subtribes constantly.

  Last night I’d resisted this wisdom. Now that I had been humbled, it hit me differently. With each success or failure, each joy or pain, I realized that I was always identifying with that fleeting experience rather than, in Blake’s words, kissing the experience as it flew. The result was simple. I wasn’t flexible like the tattooed tube master. I was more like Eduardo, failing to enjoy the bumpy ride.

  10

  A good traveler has no fixed plans

  and is not intent upon arriving.

  A good artist lets his intuition

  lead him wherever it wants.

  —Lao Tzu

  When Siri came back from her morning walks, she was often effusive about the smallest things: a boy she saw carrying helium balloons, an old Mayan woman she spoke to about embroidery. She had that childlike wonder, that rare ability to give every seemingly common color, taste, or texture a second chance at greatness. Her attention to Puerto’s less highlighted features always helped me feel as though we were in a small authentic Mexican town rather than the gentrified, surf-colonized center of Mexican drug trade we’d now realized Puerto Escondido was. But the day my board broke, Siri came back with an extra glow.

  “I met these Italian guys on the beach!” she announced. “They want to cook dinner for us tonight!”

  I’d been in a great mood—feeling a little wise from making peace with my broken board. But dining with Italian men who had somehow made Siri speak in this giddy tone didn’t hit me right.

  “Why?” I said, more sharply than I’d wanted.

  “I don’t know,” Siri said. “But they’re hilarious. You’ve got to meet them.”

  “I do?” I said.

  If there was one type of food I’d eat forever, it would, without question, be Italian. If I had to live anywhere on earth, I might choose Sicily. Also, I’m usually open to meeting just about anyone on a trip. That’s what travel is about. But with the increasing uncertainty around the long-term prospects of our relationship—which I blamed on Siri and she likely blamed on me—Siri and I had both been swinging back and forth between aloof, then jealous, then enamored. It was increasingly rare that our enamored times lined up. At present, I felt that I was the more aloof one. I had a slight wandering eye, swinging back and forth between fantasizing about a family with Siri and about running off to Fiji with that super funny, good-looking surfer girl with a French accent who I knew existed but who hadn’t yet paddled into my life.

  But with Siri now beaming about hilarious Italian men, the pendulum was flipping.

  Jealousy, not surprisingly, is an insecure little creature. Like any bad idea, it needs to surround itself with worse ideas to feel validated. Once you get jealous about something small—a glance, a comment—that little flea wakes and calls all its friends: all the insecurities you’ve ever felt about your looks or your finances or your intelligence, all those times you felt helpless or ashamed as a kid. All those monsters decide to throw a drunken bonfire and tell scary stories.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t we just . . . I don’t know . . .”

  I realized it would be weird for me to turn down our first offer to hang out with other people. Plus, I was now kissing the joys as they flew.

  “Oh, come on!” Siri said. “Don’t be uptight!”

  I walked around the villa looking as if I had something to do, but I kept forgetting what I was trying to look as if I was doing.

  Siri had me. She knew calling me uptight would rile my laid-back image of myself. The fact that she knew this about me meant I was far from my desired image of myself.

  “OK,” I said. “Sounds cool.”

  That evening, I put on the only collared shirt I’d brought with me, and we walked down the beach to the Italian guys
’ casita—twice the size of ours. With its own infinity pool.

  A tan shirtless man answered the door, and it was worse than I’d thought. He looked like the grown love child of Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek.

  “Siri!” he said, kissing her on the cheek as if they were old friends.

  “Giancarlo!” she said.

  Giancarlo then turned to me.

  “Buona sera, Jaimal. Siri tell me all about you! Big surfer! Wow!”

  “Hi,” I said, giving Giancarlo my best bring-it-you-suave-idiot look—a look I hoped came off as ultra laid-back. But also dangerous.

  Meanwhile, Piero—equally handsome and wearing an unbuttoned guayabera—was cooking tomato sauce that smelled like it was wafting out of Tuscany. I turned to the window, unbuttoning my shirt a notch, while Giancarlo poured us some wine.

  I was wondering what to say. But before I could decide, Giancarlo was pushing steaming plates in front of us.

  “Mangia! Mangia! Please!”

  Fresh crab, mussels, and deep-fried sardines, all garnished with herbs and butter, began appearing, one after the other. The table looked like a spread from Bon Appétit’s travel guide down the Italian coast.

  “Where did you guys get this?” Siri asked, happier, it seemed to me, than she’d been in some time.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, I love Mexico,” Giancarlo said, topping off our glasses. “Piero and I find all this today in the sea! All of it! I think the Mexico crab want to crawl in your mouth, you know? Lo mangio!”

  I’m a vegetarian but an undisciplined one. I sometimes make exceptions when special meals are cooked for me. Plus, I didn’t want to look like the one rigid guy around the Italian model-chefs. And though the jealous monsters in me wanted to throw all these plates against the wall, my tongue had other plans. The food was on par with the best meals I’d ever had actually in Italy.

  But how could I really enjoy myself with these men I was sure were after Siri? Meanwhile, Siri of course was seeming more perfect, more undoubtedly my soul mate, the nicer these Italian men were to her. As he stirred the sauce, Piero said that the wine—a Sangiovese—was one of just two bottles they’d brought from home. The other bottle was not wine at all but olive oil Piero’s father had pressed himself.

  “You guys!” Siri said.

  But come on. Now they were sharing their only Italian wine. I stayed quiet, trying to slump in my chair so as to continue my cool-danger look. But then Piero took me by the arm: “Ven, Jaimal. Ven.”

  For a moment, I was positive Piero was trying to distract me while Giancarlo made out with Siri, something Siri would never do, but jealousy can warp the mind into both writing and believing the most outlandish tales. I stiffened up, peering over my shoulder. But Piero was only leading me to the stove. He handed me a spoon.

  “Please, please taste,” he said. “It is from our provincia!”

  Often when you’re having a good meal with new friends, someone asks, “What was your best meal ever—I mean, ever?” I’ve noticed a lot of people have trouble with this question, which makes sense. By the time you’re twenty, you’ve eaten more than twenty thousand meals. I love this question. To this day—and maybe it was because I had let my expectations drop to watching my girlfriend leave me for two Italian men—I have never, ever tasted anything like Piero and Giancarlo’s pasta. The sauce Piero asked me to taste defies description because it was so mind-bendingly simple. It was in one sense, tomato sauce. According to Piero and Giancarlo, it had only five ingredients. Basil. Garlic. Olive oil. Tomatoes. “And a secret we will never tell.”

  It was not tomato sauce. And when Giancarlo poured it over handmade fettuccine, which they had made from local flour and eggs, we couldn’t stop eating.

  I don’t much remember what was said after that. But I do remember I no longer worried if Piero and Giancarlo were after Siri. (If they kept this pasta coming, I might have suggested we all live together.) I just recall laughing and laughing and eating and eating. I also remember we found out Piero and Giancarlo were pharmacists from a tiny northern Italian region that spoke a dialect that was unintelligible even to other Italians. I recall them saying, “We eat our way through Mexico for three month! Three month! I love it!” And anything we said that evening, Giancarlo shouted out, “Oh, oh! Lo mangio!” I also remember that by the end of the night, I felt as if Piero and Giancarlo were family.

  When we left, Giancarlo and Piero kissed us both on the cheeks.

  “You have the wine in your blood now,” Piero said. “You always welcome our home.”

  This would’ve been my cue to feel like an ass. But as we walked back home along the beach that night, barefoot in the warm sea, I was nearly crying with gratitude.

  Suzuki Roshi once said, “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

  It’s hard to have an empty mind. We are experts of noise and scatteredness. But it’s not that hard to empty out expectations a little, to pry yourself just slightly more open to life, which was really the lesson of Eduardo, the broken board, and the pasta sauce—one that finally started to sink in just as we were preparing to leave.

  Since we’d begun this trip, Siri had been suggesting we go camping at Lagunas de Chacahua, a bird sanctuary the Lonely Planet said we could boat through and end up on a deserted beach. Since the trip involved sacrificing tubes, I’d been dragging my feet on this suggestion. But the next morning, while Siri and I sipped our coffee and attempted to read the news in Spanish, I said, “Why don’t we do the bird sanctuary today?”

  “Really?” Siri said, skeptically.

  “What?” I said. “I like birds. I love birds.”

  We took one of the rusty provincial buses to the preserve, then hopped a zodiac ride through miles of marshland. The motor made it too loud to speak, but the scenery filled the roaring silence. Storks, herons, pelicans, and spoonbills swooped and dove and waded. It was cooler among the thick trees, and wonderful to be away from Puerto’s drunken tourism.

  We camped out under mosquito nets that night and the wonderfulness didn’t remain. The campsite owner—a squat, ornery woman—insisted on blaring mariachi music until 2:00 a.m., apparently trying to attract a party. The fact that nobody was showing didn’t deter her. We slept poorly.

  But at first light, we walked a mile down the coast to a neighboring beach where strange, brown stone formations jutted out of the blue sea like petrified dinosaurs. At the end of the beach, surrounded by these rocks, there was a small cove with water as clear as freshly cleaned windows.

  The waves here were tiny: barely two feet. No chance of anything but catching a wave and letting it push you gently across the inlet. But I had brought my fat old fish—the only board I had now. And after floating about with Siri, I paddled out and began letting these minuscule waves drift me into the sand.

  There was no crowd of surfers here to impress, no competition. And I spent time on the waves like I used to as a boy in the Azores, marveling at how the light passed through the water.

  Looking back, nearly every one of those Puerto sessions is a little fuzzy when I conjure it to write. It’s as if I watched those waves on a channel with too much static. Expectations too full to register the color. But that evening in the cove, like the first taste of Piero and Giancarlo’s pasta, remains clear. I paddled back and forth, back and forth, not caring in the slightest about what the next ride might be like. If any ride came at all.

  11

  For example, noble sir, without going out into the great ocean, it is impossible to find precious, priceless pearls. Likewise, without going into the ocean of passions, it is impossible to obtain the mind of omniscience.

  —The Vimalakirti Sutra

  When he attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree, the first thing the Buddha said was this: “Wonder of wonders! All beings just as they are whole and complete! All beings are endowed with Buddha-nature
! But because of their deluded thinking, they fail to realize it.”

  This statement was really the first koan. The Buddha went on to teach meditation, ethics, and philosophy for forty-five years. He taught to monks and nuns, kings and criminals. And if all beings are already whole and complete, why did the Buddha go to all that trouble?

  Zen practitioners delve into this paradox and conclude that the only difference between a Buddha and an ordinary person is a shift in perspective, a shift from the myopic to the vast, a shift that many masters have explained through oceanic metaphors. Hakuun Yasutani said our Buddha-nature “is like the sea, and each individual is like a wave on the surface of the ocean.” To elaborate, spiraling waves (our egos) are caught in their own churn of self-centeredness. We view our borders as firm and absolute, our thoughts and feelings as ours alone, happening only inside the walls of our skin. But that’s not even close to true. Our bodies and thoughts are not only interdependent on the world around us; they are just like waves—fluid energy moving through the fluid fabric of reality. This may sound abstract, but all objects exist in relation to other objects. A rubber tire exists because of the rubber tree. A rubber tree exists because of earth, sun, and rain. Earth, sun, and rain exist because of chemical elements. Chemical elements exist because of atoms and subatomic particles. We are all constructed of those tiny particles, and if we could see life at this level, we would see how particles “outside” us constantly move through us, become us, and we move through them, become them too. It’s just like watching waves refract and mix at the shoreline. But in meditation, this can be experienced. In looking inward, when the mind truly quiets and can dwell in its primal state, we see and feel that our perception of separation has always been a fractured view. In reality, our individual wave has also always been the same nature as the entire sea. All water.