LIFE'S A BEACH
that feeling when you get out of the water and drip dry in the sun aka me talking about how I love Rockaway <3
Some consider Late Summer to be a season of its own. I definitely do. It starts around the third week of August and progresses through the fall equinox. With the last bursts of the sun’s energy, we are asked to cultivate. Astrology fans (love u!) know that this coincides well with Virgo season. Virgo, however discerning, is an Earth sign: the nurturer of agriculture.
This time of year, to me, feels like a plum bursting with its own juices. You gotta eat it now, but also… maybe you’ve eaten a lot of plums and you’re kind of full :)
This is why Late Summer is my favorite season, and also why it’s a bit of an impossibility; planning is more urgent, everything is glazed in sweat, and anticipation reverberates. But you gotta enjoy it!! The salve, I find, is to go out to Rockaway.
Though I was raised in New York City, I never really grew up going to the Rockaways. I actually started going as a young adult because it became clear that it was a specifically *NYC Service Industry* thing to do. One thing I love about the service industry is that – often because you have so little time away from work – you really consider what will be optimal fun when you have the time to. The fun at Rockaway contains both pleasure and baptism; go to Rippers, let your skin take nutrients from the sun, jump in the water, emerge.
Rockaway, despite all the Nutcrackers, feels very moralizing. Maybe it’s the calm of what is communal. I love standing in the water, looking to my left and right, observing how we’re all watching the waves come in and feeling what I can only imagine is the same collective emotion as the tides approach us. Where else do people all lie down together or swim beside each other, strangers, feeling good?
Last summer, feeling desperately restless and deciding I wasn’t getting enough Vitamin D, I woke one morning at 5:30. I drove myself to the beach for some hours before I had to go to work. The day was beautiful and the beach was near empty.
I brought watermelon and Speedboat; the first, I quickly finished, and the second, I somehow never can. Driving home, I ended up getting into a small accident. No one was hurt, thank God, but I remember the glass crashing into my window and sounding like wind chimes.
As D.T. Suzuki wrote, “the idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows.” Maybe that’s why Rockaway always feels cinematic, and also somehow like I’m the least on display compared to almost everywhere else.
In talking about how much I like the beach, I am making myself terribly vulnerable to the potential of being twee. Perhaps to save face, and perhaps to keep some sentiment to myself, here’s
A little constellation of my brain’s Rockaway:
- There is no better beach song, trance-y and romantic, than Lucky, by Grace Ives. This textures each trip for me. I listen each time I go.
- This is The Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913) by Joseph Stella. Futurist! Reminds me of the vision dots when you take off your sunglasses and it’s bright out.
- When the beach feels a little surreal, which it sometimes can, I think of the VERY freaky Emily Dickinson poem 656, “I started early – Took my dog”.To describe more would be futile, but reading it is fun.
- We can talk all day about iconic beach looks, but something special is the way the Rippers burger is sometimes in a little outfit.
- I like to wear white sneakers to the beach, 1. So that they can get more sanded down and 2. So that when I get home, however messy it may be, I can have a little sand in my shoes as a souvenir.
Those close to me know that I am bad at playing in waves. This feels very antithetical to my personality, but it’s the truth. Yes, the water can be crowded and I can be worried about a child on a boogie board T-boning me. But even more: I still struggle to accept that in order to weather the waves, you have to go under them. Instead, I let the waves hit me, which ends up being a rather hard slap. If anyone has any tips for how I can outgrow this petit deficit (or deep flaw in my personhood), do let me know!!
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Thank you for reading <3 and lmk if you’re going to the beach soon!
Next week! : Interiority//Exteriority//and PRIVATE CHEFFING