Soaking In Some Beach Magic

The slowing down process begins even before we actually arrive.

As we get closer to the drawbridge, each of us find ourselves instinctively rolling down the car windows to smell the salt air, feel the sea breeze, hear the call of the laughing gull.

Then as the hours and days pass, the ancient rhythms of the seashore work their magic on us.

We’re invited, prompted at every turn, to shed our layers – of clothes and of schedules. We find ourselves drawn to notice what is, and what always has been – the roll of the waves, the pull of the changing tides, the near-constant sea breeze, the herons languorously flapping their way across the grasses.

“One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone,” says Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her classic book Gift from the Sea.  “One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea – bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.”

In today’s hectic worlds, both at work and at home, the “scribblings” of busy-ness easily take over our every day lives.  Our preoccupations and urgent “must-do” lists often obscure what is important to us and what brings our lives meaning.

But when we are near the sea for a few days, we regain a sense of our true “selves,” our center, that “hub of the wheel” Lindbergh describes, to which all our relationships are connected.

Have you noticed that, upon returning from a beach vacation, most of us resign ourselves to now needing to “get back to reality”?

What if, instead, we considered the possibility that upon returning from the sea, we are actually returning from reality, and that the way of being that we embodied there is actually our natural state, available to us always?

With every mindful breath we breathe in and then breathe out, as part of our mindfulness practice and throughout each day, we can slow down, notice, and imagine the rhythm of the seashore calling us back to center.

“When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending to the periphery of the circle,” Lindbergh says. “We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.”

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(as previously published in The Bucks County Herald)