Awakening

It was his spiritual advisor who’d suggested he try meditation. “Just go and find what’s true.” That was the advice. Torn between warm feelings for the man and resistance to the idea, he asked if a walking meditation would be alright. Thankfully, his guru was all for it. He’d not had the strength to endure the kind of torment, just sitting and just breathing and, worst of all, just being with himself, would evoke. He tried a brief walkabout that night going out around his place for a short time, and even that was rather powerful, in a restless and uncomfortable sort of way. He thought about the toxicity in his life, his unstable relationships and poor decision making, and felt agitated and angry by the time he went back inside. He checked in with the guru, who simply smiled through the screen — theirs was an online relationship — and advised him to continue on.

Daybreak after a fitful sleep, and the seeker found himself on the shore, sitting atop a seawall at the end of the beach. His perch offered a view of all the garbage this far corner had washed up. Further in, they took better care, with white sand and a nice pier, but here, where nobody was around to see, there was a sorry lot of filth. Big stuff, too, like bicycles and pieces of metal, full bags of garbage, and plenty of decaying sea life adding to the gross stink. The fall from the seawall, adding to the sense of wrongness, would injure him badly if not kill him dead, being a mass of jutting concrete at least twenty feet down.

He wrinkled his nose. Not that it made him nauseous, but more like a sick blackness, reminding him of the disgusting truth — man and man’s legacy, so polluted and foul, the damning evidence cast it off to one side of the beach where nobody had to see it. But he could. And that sense that they — no, we — had fucked it all up, produced a tar-like, soul-sucking bile which grew, and intensified, and felt like death.

That evening he and his guru, a title strong in his heart though that was soon to change, had a long, deep conversation that lasted into the night. He didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want to think anymore, about what all of it meant. Didn’t want to seek. He feared disapproval, but the other just smiled and, with deep love in his eyes, simply said, “I get it. But you’ve got to go back now.”

Seawall at Inage Kaigan Beach in Chiba, Japan

He slept even more uneasily, but went back to the beach first thing once more. This time he sat on the wall for a little while, felt some of that same blackness, but it wasn’t as intense as before, and he didn’t need to stay. He felt drawn to the middle of the beach, the cleaner part, where there was a gleaming white pier and a bit more life to it. And instead of scavenging birds, there was more seagull territory and there were ducks and that sort of thing. He liked the sounds the birds made, the screeching of the gulls and the occasionally low and powerful thwap of a crow as it swooshed by, on the hunt and vigilant. There was also the feel of that white sand under his feet, something he felt keenly grounded by in these summer days, when he could kick off his flip-flops and just be unfettered.

So that’s where he was the second day, after sitting on the seawall a while. A place more suitable for reflection, perhaps, although in both cases it seemed to suit his mood and heart-space. Or maybe it was just chicken and the egg. If he strolled over to the polluted area, his good vibe might be gone. He didn’t want to try. He felt good, and had lost some of that black bile-energy. He stayed a while, until the sun sank and the colors threatened to elevate his mood above that so-so, just okay that he was comfortable with. So he left before true twilight, the last time he’d leave the beach before the light for a long while.

He went home and slept another night, and came back the third day, going straight to the good part of the beach. He didn’t need to see the garbage, or perhaps he was just wanting to ignore it the way everybody else did. Today, it was all about the white sand. And at that point, instead of feeling his own small self and his own little world and his addictions and his internet scrolling and all the other sugar and porn and everything else that was invading into his life and messing him up, he felt a sense of stillness and silence and quiet.

He looked far, over the water towards the horizon, and up into the blue dome of sky and felt..something. A presence of something so real, so tangible. And everything was suddenly so much bigger than what he’d known before. The vastness of the ocean afar, the infinity of the sky above. And all so unbelievably powerful, so much so that he should have been afraid. But he knew, too, there was nothing to fear. Then came a throat-clenching, icy realization that he had no business being alive here. No business being alive, at all. All those foolish decisions and careless risks, the deadly addictions and dangerous behaviors.

Overpowering that sudden, horrible realization, a swell of the sweetest gratitude came, choking him up with the intensity of it, the aliveness of being in a singular moment, as he’d never known it could be, even though it felt like it had always been this way.

He dropped to his knees, then his hands. He watched through blurred vision as his tears hit the sand.

Emotions rushed up and coursed through him. But once passed, in the subsiding relief he was able to reflect, taking deep breaths and appreciating the beauty of — all of it. He rose and started towards the seawall. He could have walked all the way to the polluted zone, but he knew that there wasn’t much he could do there, not by himself, and not right now. So he picked up a few wrappers and a few bottles and cleaned up the part of the beach that he could handle, and then sat quiet for the remainder of the day. The sunset was exquisite, and he wept again as it washed over his awakened self.

The conversation that night was intimate, not like their previous ones. The guru said: “You found it, then.”

It wasn't a question.

The man from the beach didn’t respond. He just smiled, with eyes full of love.