The Actual Waves.

A marker in the concrete and a meditation on sand.

We took the trailer to the coast for three days. The trip charged full price: a blowout on the pass, hours on the shoulder, short sleep, small injuries. None of it moved my mood significantly. The boys were making memories in bulk, and that was the trade.

On the second day we drove to the aquarium. No luck finding parking, so I pulled into the first garage I saw. Flat rate, I’m over this egg hunt before it began, we’re done. The attendant pointed us to the second floor and the one spot left in the building. I stepped out, walked around the back of the truck, and there it was in big yellow stencil on the concrete: 333.

I haven’t seen 333 in a long time. The pairs show up constantly — 444, 1111, 1212 — and I don’t hold them as meaningful as the original 333. Looking for a thing has a tendency to make it appear everywhere, especially clocks. 333 came much differently to me. Years ago, in a Liminal vision after a lucid dream, an invisible hand wrote out a sentence in old cursive I could not read. Then the same hand wrote 3 three times, and all of it went up in smoke as if burned into parchment. Unsolicited then, unsolicited now — the wrong garage, no plan, the last spot holding the significant number. I gave a hearty chuckle upon seeing it and called Kim over.

Later that afternoon we found the beach. I lay on a towel and covered my head with the youngest boy’s hat. A quick, peaceful meditation. Just stillness, all senses registering, building the environment around me. The boys working on a sand castle. Kim walking over to help. The boys in the water now. People passing. Strong gusts of wind, the sun feels good in the breaks. A seagull shuffled through one of our bags and I told it politely to leave; it hung around nonetheless but at least wasn’t looking for food or anything shiny this time. I should have named it for this moment.

And the waves. Crashing like so many binaural tracks I’ve listened to over the years — except here I was, grounded on sand, listening to the actual waves move in and out, softly crashing and retreating. The smell of the Pacific over all of it.

After resting in observation, I began retreating the senses one by one. I got close to just being when Kim walked up and asked if I was asleep. It’s complicated, as she knows well by now. Putting the body to sleep is not a problem at all anymore; I used to think cognition and rest this fast was impossible. It is, because this isn’t cognition. It’s awareness, the one who has the mind, not the other way around.

I looked up and saw the boys playing between my feet, out in the distance. I just watched, I wish I could watch that scene forever. I took a photo. Kim sat down and played with them. I took more. That is my core memory, the moment that made the whole trip worth everything. Kim reached the same conclusion on her own: it was the only stretch of the trip where we weren’t rushing anywhere. A brief space and time to engage deeply with the moment.

I don’t have to like everything about traveling with our little trailer. The boys are collecting experiences, and experience leads to knowledge. A friend put it his own way: “You will forget about the pain… after a while. Then you will remember when you do it again.” I told him you could say that about incarnating in this physical reality too.