Remind Me I'm Alive

[Editors' note: This is the fourth in a series of posts that recognizes the winners of the third annual creative competition sponsored by Kauai Backstory. This year's theme: Surf. Congratulations everyone.]

by Ben House

When I was a kid I asked a neighborhood boy how to pray. He described something like a person-to-person phone call. I tried it once but no one spoke on the other end so I figured it didn't work.

Later I met many people who said god spoke to them, but not in the way that people speak to each other. Some hear god in the in rustling leaves or waterfall's roar. Others hear it in guitar's plucked strings or see it in an artist's brushstroke. Maybe god's voice comes in a baby's cry or a loved one's embrace. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan wondered if we might find a message from god in the infinite digits of the number pi, a code written into the laws of geometry.

Light waves bring the world to my eyes and sound waves to my ears so I can perceive my world but what about the waves traveling across the ocean to the shores of Kauai? What do they bring? Is there a message for me or for us?

As I stand on the cliff to check the surfing conditions at Hideaways I wonder if my mind is big enough to grasp the enormity of what the sea would be saying if waves were words. Maybe it's more like music, with all the winds of the Pacific blowing a song ancient and unimaginably
complex.

With my feet on the motionless ground all I can do is wonder. But in the water on my surfboard I'm no longer a spectator. If the language of the ocean is beyond my mind's comprehension, I can still experience its motion in my body.

Maybe that's what I didn't understand when I tried to pray as a kid. Maybe god doesn't speak in the words we use because there are no words for what god has to say to us. It's only through experience that we ever really understand, anyway. I don't know if I could say what I've
learned surfing Kauai's warm waters. Is god loving or wrathful? The ocean can be both. Ecstasy, frustration, humility and more are all there. Above all, I always want more and the ocean always has more to offer.

I'm one of those people that wants answers but the ocean only gives up its secrets on its terms and it's more like poetry than prose, more like the moon with its shifting rhythms and cloud dances than the sun with its daily, decisive brilliance, more like a feeling than a thought. Maybe my body can feel the entirety of what my mind can only wonder at. It looks like a good day to go find out.