Surfing the Sandhills

I have gotten it in my head that I am going to learn to surf. I voiced this out loud to a coworker (in her 20s, from Southern California) and expressed my concern about being able to pop up on the surf board (the pop up is when you go from laying on your stomach to standing on the board). "You can totally do it! It's not hard!" she insisted. And she demonstrated a pop up for me in the hallway of my office in her work clothes.

So California. So 20s, when everything seems possible. And positive. Why was she being nicer to me than I am to myself?

You can totally do it! It's not hard!

So I entered an essay contest to win a week at a surf camp for women:

In a landlocked State my connection to the rhythms of the planet comes from the change in seasons and migration of birds, not the ocean. I hike under a huge sky through tall prairie grass growing on an ancient sea. When hiking in the Sandhills, now grazing land for cattle, I find broken bits of seashell left from sea creatures 15,000 years ago. Grass moves in the wind like water, though the ocean water left is deep beneath the Sandhills in an enormous aquifer under the Plains.

I turned 41 years old this year and I am floundering a bit to stay afloat. It took much less than 15,000 years for my life to change, but as I age and take on more leadership in my career, as my children become adults, as my body and mind resist the notion that they are somehow “old,” I feel a need to reconnect with myself and the Earth. I surf the hills on my walks far from the ocean and long to surf actual waves. I want to connect to the rhythm of the ocean in Las Olas by actively riding the waves rather than simply letting them crash around me.