I have a side hustle teaching yoga at a studio with a view of a lake. The owner has been a friend and a mentor for a long time. Since the day we met, I have always felt like he really understood me. That’s not a feeling I get from many people. In my head I call him Vitamin V. Between Power Yoga, Bikram, Yin, Tai Chi, and Hop Ki Do, V teaches upwards of 35 classes per week. I swear I took yoga teacher training for one reason only. V needs some help.
So far I’ve got one regular class over there and I can sub in a pinch. V is like no boss I have ever had. We seem to have transcended money. We pass it back and forth from time to time with a casual faith that it will all shake out. We both get the importance, so we don’t have to talk about it. Which leaves us free to talk about other matters that float up above commerce. This money thing is cool and different and worth mentioning, but it isn’t the main reason that I am so grateful to be able to work for V; I have never felt so trusted by anyone. More than 35 classes a week and I have never seen V mail one in. I think this is why he has faith in me. I am not the stable figure that he is outside the studio. My life is not necessarily arranged in such a way that round the clock meditations on peace, and generating clam, are practical. The stakes in my life are high and I am an emotional person and I may wear it on my sleeve in the lobby but never in the studio. My default setting is to work very hard and I never mail it in either. My DNA doesn’t permit it.
As I was preparing for today’s class I was thinking about how grateful I am that V lets me play the music I like, set the temperature where I like, do the poses I like, at the pace I like. If I want to tell stories or jokes at the beginning it’s totally cool. His background is Martial Arts and that influences his style. I played ice hockey in Pennsylvania and something similar is true of me. Not afraid to go hard. Sometimes it gets ugly. Teeth are lost. The truth is that at this point I have a lot of regular students. I also have a brain that tends to connect dots over time. I went a little deeper with this word ‘gratitude.’ Wondering what it really meant to me. I could quote the O.E.D. and be done with it. Or if I was crazy lazy, I could Google it. But I don’t define important words like that. In my life, all of the important words (i.e. fear, sadness, catharsis, potential, etc.) had their meanings cemented in moments. I recall learning the meaning of the word ‘gratitude’ nineteen years ago in Costa Rica. This is the story:
In 2001 my dog and I went on an extended surf trip that took us all the way down to a little town on la Costa Pacifica de C. R. called Esterillos Oeste. It would probably be a well-known surf town if it weren’t surrounded by surf towns that were better developed, and with breaks that were more consistent and hollow. The wave at Esterillos was a deep water, right point (with occasional inside lefts). There was some reef out there in the impact zone, but the peak was determined by the shifting of the sands on the ocean floor; and since the take-off was so far out, it was a fickle wave to line up. Locking into a big one was ‘vale la pena.’ Translated: Worth it. It wasn’t Pavones but there was a lot of glassy wall to have fun with between the drop and the beach. With the right swell direction, a surfer could link four distinct sections. In case this isn’t coming across: fucking bliss.
I rented a house in town and took a thorough break from driving the car through sweltering landscapes. This is the complete list of things I did during the three months I lived there: surf, eat, read books in a hammock, play chess, practice my espanol with the locals (there were some older ex pats there but I didn’t know them nearly as well as I knew the Ticos). After a couple of months I was starting to get dialed in on the wave. Like I said, it came out of deep water and was shifty. The Tico kids always seemed to know exactly what the ocean was about to do. Makes sense. They had been watching the break all their lives. I had just shown up. I was a relatively new surfer. So new that I was regularly trading in boards for smaller ones as I became a faster swimmer and able to handle steeper water. The day that I learned the meaning of ‘gratitude’ is a day that will always be remembered fondly by exactly four people as ‘Aquel Jueves.’ Translated: That Thursday.
It had to have been mellow in the ocean for a week or so because it felt like the swell came out of nowhere. Flat calm at night. By sunrise there were stacks of glassy lumps all the way to the horizon and the energy was building. My jaw hit the sand. I dumped my coffee and ran back to the casita for my board. The plan was to snag a few and come back in for a big breakfast.
I think that superlatives are weak words and I won’t use one to describe Aquel Jueves. The plan to come in for breakfast turned into a plan to come in for lunch, and eventually a vague concern for parts of my skin that were turning purple (acclimated but still a gringo). Whether you surf or not, picture this cross section of events: perfect day in the tropics, warm water, in the last half year you’ve spent more time surfing than walking, you’re with friends but no one from the city knows about the swell so there is hardly anyone out, you’re body is as fit as it will ever be, there is no wind at all, the ocean is absolutely firing, sets of four between eight and twelve foot, your responsibilities are fuck all, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
It frustrates me that so many languages don’t have a useful translation for the word ‘cool.’ I can’t get through the day without using it a few hundred times. My espanol is tight and whether or not I get to drop ‘cool’ as much as I’d like is a function of which Spanish speaking country I am in. In Costa Rica they have a fine equivalent for ‘cool.’ In fact, their word is probably even better. Their word is two words: pura vida. Translated: Pure life. But it doesn’t sound the way it would if you walked around the United States saying ‘pure life’ about everything. Down there it is just part of the music of the language. In order to have words like ‘cool’ and ‘pura vida’ the concept has to exist. And for the concept to exist, someone has to embody it. Meet Tigre (Tiger).
In 2001 Tigre looked just like your average Mayan Prince. I think he was eighteen. He was an enigma in that he ate well and took good care of his body. He had silky black hair that hung to his waist. Never one knot in it. He had the lean body of a swimmer. He had an attractive blond girlfriend from the Netherlands. She didn’t surf. Tigre ruled the water. When I first started surfing there he was mythological. Tigre worked in construction and wasn’t around most of the day. He would often just appear in the water at some opportune moment, taking every set wave, never looking like he had to put an ounce of effort into paddling. There are surfers that are working hard to get rides and there are surfers that are in total harmony with the movement of the water. They don’t work at all. Tigre found all the barrels, he could do re entry hits and 360s, I never saw him miss a section. I got to know him the longer I lived there. Tigre was from a tough place to be from. At that time he had just a slight advantage over his peers. He was willing to work hard; In the water and on the land. He thought about things. He had a method. He watched what he ate and tempered his alcohol consumption. It was more typical of the Ticos in that town to ingest anything and everything that they could get their hands on. Surviving can be so hard. I can see why surviving well is beyond comprehension for some. I respect him so much for his conscious effort. In the early afternoon on Aquel Jueves, Tigre appeared in the line up, alongside myself, Chetty, and Alfonso.
We traded waves. The ocean was serving up as much as we could stand and then some. It was overwhelming. At some point I started letting some sets just go by. My arms were rubber but they were still working. My belly was raw from laying on the board in the salt water all day. The rash inside my thighs from the side rails burned. I’m not bellyaching. All of this stuff was minor and would heal in a few days. A session like that was hard to come by. I rallied and moved in on the next set. I think I took the second wave almost all the way in and Tigre caught the one behind me; an absolute tower that I saw him take off on the first time I came up to the lip. I remember racing through the first section and hearing the sound of the white water from Tigre’s wave as it connected in the pit. The swell that had built to being steadily overhead was acquiring even more juice.
I didn’t consider going in after that ride, even though I was pretty spent. There was a serious calm after that set and there was a lot of suspense, at least in my head, about what was going to happen next. Alfonso was still outside, Chetty was stroking out behind me. Tigre wasn’t in view at first. This was not a problem. The rip was pretty strong and the paddle back out was over with pretty fast, even though it was long. The next set still hadn’t arrived. Chetty and I pulled up alongside Alfonso. I sat up on my 6’3” Jean Noel, little Brazilian board, and looked for Tigre. Instead of riding the current back out to the line up, he was laying on his board, with his back arced upward, wet hair hanging behind his face, chocolate eyes locked in on surface of the water, lazily stroking his way into the impact zone.
Tigre didn’t have as much time to spend in the water as some of the unemployed kids that also had boards. It made no difference. It was probably to his advantage that he was motivated and that his time was structured. It honed his focus. His investment in the moment was total. The wave that he had just surfed had to be as fine as any that the little bay had ever coughed up. A fish jumped. A few clouds hung in the sky but it was so calm it seemed like they may never move at all. Tigre paddled further in. A pair of pelicans tracked north, just a few feet above the first wave in the next set. It was still pretty far out and the shadow in the pit was getting darker and wider in a hurry. Tigre was in no hurry at all, already well past the point of no return. The wave kept standing up, the birds peeled away, and the sea level dropped around Tigre as the wave swallowed up the energy of whatever was in its way. The three of us were safely off the shoulder, being lifted up, but easily going to get over the lip. We just sat and watched on our boards. The peak wasn’t that far from us. Where Tigre was, crazy deep, it was more like a heavy ledge. At the moment that it started to throw, Tigre boosted up to a seat, tipped his head back, the end of his hair was in the water. He was relaxed. His eyes were closed. His arms were energized, like a warriors, open like a V and pointing at the sky. He looked just like that when the lip hit him in the chest. Some waves break, others detonate. This was the latter.
What just happened? Honestly, I’m still in the process of working it out. Tigre was a deep and serious person. Surfing that break was part of his soul. And even for a kid who grew up on that very same beach, Aquel Jueves was a sweet spot in history. I’ve had other experiences like this one, where nature comes out of nowhere to make you feel so blessed, and so fucking sure that you are on your path, that you become injected with a level of faith and confidence and focus that allows your expectations of your own abilities to start blossoming in every direction. I am smart enough to cherish it. I am smart enough to know that I can’t throw my body in front of time and make it stop. I’ve never done anything like Tigre did though.
If you surf you are likely catching on to how truly special this was. If you don’t, keep hanging in there. For surfers, or really anyone whose soul’s condition is bound to their relationship with forces of nature that adhere to unpredictable rhythms, there are moments that are as good as it gets. Moments that are the reason that you ever get up and do anything. Because you know, if you play your hand right, you can pretty much kiss [God] and come back to tell the tale; at least one more time. At some point there won’t be another time. That is true for us all. And I can see the wisdom in engineering an exit in the midst of a moment of complete harmony with every force in the universe (it is accurate that every object of mass in the universe has a quantifiable attraction to every other object of mass in the universe, and therefore affects the dynamics of every wave in the ocean). The ocean gave us such a precious gift that day, in exchange, Tigre offered up himself. The gesture was massive.
It’s nice to think that nature cares about gestures. I’m not sure. I want to believe it does. So much that I will always make them. Even without proof. If this world were a merciful place, Tigre would have drowned that afternoon.
He disappeared under a wall of whitewater that was churning its way in toward the beach. The pile lost some of its power when it got close to the inner reef section. Seemed like along time but it was probably only fifteen seconds before his boards was tombstoning at the surface. He crawled up the leash and found his way back from the deep a few seconds later. He had to pick his way through the rocks a bit but he was more or less just flushed in after that. The three of us took off on the next set that came through. Just picking up the shoulders to get into the beach. No longer going for it. That was enough. The four us sat on the beach without talking and watched set after set of perfect waves peel across the bay with nobody on them. I can’t believe I am writing this: it was better than surfing.
Aquel Jueves is so steeped in irony in my mind. Not surfing was better than surfing. The need to be in the water felt so urgent all day, and then the feeling evaporated. The only thing that mattered was watching, listening to, and smelling the waves. We worked so hard, and then we just stopped and didn’t work at all. We didn’t talk either. There was nothing to say in any language. I knew something important had just happened, but I couldn’t reason it out at the time and it would have been wrong of me to try. I did what I was supposed to do. I just sat there with my Tico friends, and let the light fade.
It’s hard to be from Esterillos Oeste. I looked at a guy like Tigre and thought he had at all. Reality is that every morning Tigre had to talk his mom out of selling his board because the family was hungry. I was well fed. My needs were all met and I was loved. I was supposedly well educated by the best instructors available. And yet the first person I ever saw arrive in a moment so perfect that they were willing to surrender completely and let the earth have them back, was a poor Tico kid, who clung to his dreams, had an incredible sense of the movement of water, and knew how to handle a surf board. It’s not nearly enough to say that Tigre letting that wave hit him was cool. That shit was pura vida (and in this instance substituting ‘pure life’ does work).
The difference between thanks and gratitude is large. There is quite a bit that I am thankful for and appreciate but aren’t signifiant enough earn a lot of deep thought from me. Gratitude is something else. When I feel it now, I feel it like Tigre felt it that today. I want to surrender myself entirely to what I am truly grateful for.
Borders are a bitch. Tigre is still around but the weight of his reality bore down on him and eventually he stopped resisting. He can still handle a board because his sense of water is so good. The hair is gone. He is no longer fit. Between odd jobs he smokes a lot of piedra (rather not translate that). It’s hard to know how to help. Perhaps help by keeping the story of him at his best alive. Not many of us witnessed it. Last I heard Chetty is still around. Alfonso vanished a while ago.
A lot of people showed up for class and we went for broke today. Everyone worked hard. Me too. With all of this on my mind I could only give 100% of myself. And I am so fortunate to have a place where I can do that. Teaching at V’s studio is not a job at all. It’s an opportunity to express myself, a chance to make an offering, and a chance to receive one. The entire experience is like Aquel Jueves. It could be luck. It could be that I deserve it. I don’t care either way. It makes no difference.
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