The highest tide I have ever seen was 1:05am on a Thursday night in the middle of December. Waves crashed over and above and around me, and I could feel their rumble down below the rocks as I stood on the jetty. As many times as I have been to this beach, as many times as I’ve surfed this very coast and hopped in the waters, the ocean, in her infinitude, had never shown this side of herself to me. She laughed at the highway, as if she and her waves knew all those cars and those lights could be theirs if they wanted. I was Jonah in the belly of the whale, completely swallowed up by the vastness and magnitude of Mother Nature, and it was terrifying and terrific and defamiliarizing all at once.
A few weeks before, I gazed up at the same sky that would blanket the ocean and make all her rolling waves look like nothing more than toy cars in a sandbox. The Nine Sisters danced over my head as the moon sang her lullaby to Cassiopeia and Orion and Maui, and lying down in the middle of the redwoods, all I could do was applaud their performance. I would breathe out and see my breath twirl from my lungs into the sky and join the dance.
Such were the two events that bookended the ten weeks of my fall quarter. Sandwiched between them were smaller infinities: new friendships made on car rides where our wet hair and sandy feet would dirty the car we were on, hours of The Great British Bake-off playing in the background in a very warm-lit room, long conversations about diversity, countless swing-outs and rock climbing blisters—not to mention the late nights holed up in the library wondering why my code wasn’t running and early mornings when my face would break through the briskness of the air and my legs would feel the first light of morning.
I used to wonder what it would be like to not have my head clouded and feel like my ears were muffled by something not seen. I would ask if there would be anything left in my head if it didn’t feel as if it were filled with fluff and what it would be like to actually feel as if it were me having fun and not someone more deserving.
But oh, friends, I feel as if the world is getting a little brighter, the colors more vivid, and the focus sharpening. For ten whole weeks just as the ocean rumbled beneath those rocks at the Princeton Jetty, I felt laughter rumble of laughter and the rosy warmth of feeling not just accepted but wanted and included.
I found a room always filled with friends and a door that’s always opened; and in it I was welcomed into sarcastic conversations and complex nuances I have been itching to talk about. I shared meals and stories around tables, sometimes with old friends, sometimes with new. I found surprisingly regularity in rock climbing sessions filled more with conversation than actual climbing (but nevertheless made my arms sore the next day). And after spending long hours writing papers and sorting through thousands of lines of data, I even made deliverables I am proud of.
You know when you’ve just been getting hit with wave after wave, and you keep going back to the water again and again for the love of the ocean and the chill of it when it hits your face. And you’re paddling and paddling out, harder and harder as each waves pulls you this way or that. But then you finally hit a good set? And you feel the same water that was slapping you so relentlessly down underneath your board, and the board stead under your feet? And you’re whipping your board around and catching in the crest, and you could have been riding it for two seconds or two hours but you have no idea—you’re just trying to ride it for as long as you can and then see how long it will take you?
Every so often, I felt my shoulders tense up and my teeth clench, as if I were bracing myself for the next impact, and much to my surprise it hasn’t. But we’re going and cruising.