Sensitivity to initial conditions in an unpredictable, foggy sea around us
“A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision.”
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”
Nikki Giovanni
“As the Albatross III groped through fog over George’s Bank all of one week in the midsummer of 1949, those of us aboard had a personal demonstration of the power of a great ocean current. There was never less than a hundred miles of cold Atlantic water between us and the Gulf Stream, but the winds blew persistently from the south and the warm breath of the Stream rolled over the Bank. The combination of warm air and cold water spelled unending fog.”
Rachel Carson
The Sea Around Us
Merriam-Webster defines “the butterfly effect as follows:
“a property of chaotic systems (such as the atmosphere) by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system”
The surf forecast is often wrong. You understand, even if you don’t surf. It’s the same with the weather. Get just a few days out from the instant of Now and, although there’s a lot we do know—the rain, should there be any, won’t suddenly fall up from the ground to pelt the clouds— there’s even more we don’t know. This is what I reminded myself of as I sat on my surfboard in the cold water of early spring. The weather was different a few yards away from me where the sun shone full force. I was surprised and a little colder than I thought I would be. It wasn’t supposed to be foggy. That wasn’t in the forecast. But fog there was. Rain wasn’t falling up but the water had, in its way, arisen and was wafting all around me, enveloping, close.
The swelling edge of fog bank, unusually well defined for North Carolina, was hovering just above the line of narrow dunes with their sparse vegetative covering, Panic Grass and Sea Oats. Those dunes are still allowed, even encouraged to exist because of the storm protection they offer the million-dollar homes built on this barrier island. “Barrier island”—a phrase we use for these shifting piles of sand, formed and revised by an endlessly moving sea. Those well-painted, well-washed houses were gleaming in the early sunshine. 
But where I floated the weather was different. It was cool, soft, the colors of the water below my surfboard muted by the suspended water that hung low over my head. There was barely any swell and it wasn’t at all clear whether I’d be able to catch any waves if any happened to appear. The immediate problem wasn’t the size of the waves. I had been in bed for the better part of 48 hours, laid low by the first dose of The Vaccine. I’d decided to come out for a short surf despite the diminished but lingering weakness that still permeated me from skin to spine. It hung inside, and here, now, instead of an exasperating annoyance (this reaction was not what I was told to expect…no one is supposed to feel ill after the first dose) the vaporous sense of dis-ease felt almost like a rightful response to the call of the fog depended— above head, settling on shoulders. I sat, bobbing on the board, watching the edge of the shrouded horizon and, trying to keep my heart on the line, to be present to the possible. I slowly filled my lungs, breathing my torso as tall and as wide as the inflation of my frame would allow, stretching myself towards the hidden sky.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
An approaching line appeared, the barest hint of a dark, elongated bump like the edge of a letter of embossed print. I tried to read the text. Despite the soft, flat light, this swell had a slight but undeniable taper on the north side of its moving body. That taper, the shoulder of what I thought was probably a wave big enough to catch, seemed headed to a spot about 20 yards away from me. I turned and laid myself down and pulled my arms through the cold water— once again, trying to keep my heart on the line…
breath
presence
possibility
I gained a little speed, first from my own efforts until I felt the lift of a force not my own, and, after two more deep, long pulls I popped up to my feet, less graceful and more halting than I can usually pull off but now
Now
Now!
I was riding, or being ridden. Instead of breathing deeply and inflating from the inside, out, I was expanded from the outside, in. I was being breathed by so many forces— all here, all now. I wasn’t making this ride happen but I had shown up for it.
I came as I was.
Weak.
Imperfect.
Prone to error.
I flew over water, through the air towards the sunlit shoreline luxury that was barely noticeable behind all those converging planetary powers, meeting in this cloud of “me.” Then the wave petered out and I turned to paddle back towards the fog.
___
I found myself in the grip of this revelatory, unexpected passion in the middle of the journey of our life. This Waves to Wisdom project is the child of this great love. Unless you have just stumbled on this blog this very second, it will be clear that I mean the love of surfing. Cornell West says that justice is what love looks like in public.
What if West is right? If he is, then it was inevitable that the combination of my generally insatiable curiosity and a new love (of surfing, surf history, surf culture) would open me up to ways that that love might play out at different scales beyond the micro-moments of my own individual life. What would love look like beyond my own soaring joy in the unmappable, ever-changing zone of the ocean’s dynamic edge?
Counting from the week I sent myself off to surf camp as a 40th birthday present, it took me 7 long years to be able to pop up and steer the board, to perceive what the wave might offer and decide how I, with my many athletic limitations, could possibly respond. That meant I was 47 before I was really doing anything that can reasonably be called “surfing.” And it wasn’t 7 years of intermittent surfing. No, when I went to surf camp (believing I would just do this fun thing, an item on a “bucket list”) I could not have known that I was at the beginning of a new, chaotic moment in my life. One of unprecedented beauty, pain, confusion, learning, and loving. But I was at a beginning, in a set of initial conditions. And sensitive. That first decade was almost exclusively intense effort after intense effort and almost uninterrupted failure. Almost.
Mostly, I pearled (what happens when you bury the nose of the board in a wave) or went over the falls (what happens when you and your board get slammed from the crest to the trough), or just missed the wave altogether (what happens when you’re too weak to match the speed of the incoming wave or too scared to catch it late, for fear of going over the falls). Usually, my mistakes came from an inability to read the wave or from my own fear manifesting as hesitation, delay. But sometimes, every once in a long string of attempts, I would paddle, long and rhythmically, so hard, so hard, so hard for the gathering height of a wave, one that might have originated a thousand miles away but was here, now, approaching me from behind as I pulled my arms through the body of the sea. I would keep my head low, remember to look where I wanted to go and feel the lift of that water-borne energy under the board and the swelling thrill in my chest as I popped (or sometimes crawled) up to my feet and sensed the gathering speed, the flying spray, the light from sky and water and my own exploding heart. And I would feel carried by the ocean, by the last invisible force of a wave’s existence, here, now as it raced over the sand with me as its grateful beneficiary. Sometimes I even remembered to stay wide open to the combination of utterly unpredictable forces at work in that moment, and the next. The lip of the wave might suddenly speed up and pitch as it found a shallow sandbar. Or it might fatten and slow over an unseen trough. Then, if I didn’t sense the subtle slowing and remember to step forward, using my weight as an accelerator, I would be left behind. Or, one of a thousand and one other phenomena might unfold and it was my unending job to stay humble and receptive and nimble enough to respond to the lead. After all, each individual wave is the result of unknowable variables in its history and present. Each wave is the final expression of a complex, chaotic system and even a tiny variation between one wave and the next can make a huge difference in how each breaks. This uncertainty keeps surfing exciting. It’s also a mentor, an exacting one whose lessons are endlessly applicable to life on land. The uncountable failures and rare, ever-thrilling successes opened ways of perceiving and learning, considering and responding that I don’t think I would have stumbled on without this unexpected relationship, this connection between my aging mind and body, the ageless ocean, and its breaking waves— each wave at the end of its own journey of being in time, of moving through the world.
What I’ve learned has wrought a kind of alchemy that brought a gilt sparkle to even the most leaden moments. It’s the kind of light that reveals truth and, over time, lies. Especially the magnetic but caustic lies just under the surface of much of what our culture encourages us to value, to seek, to sacrifice for, and to be satisfied with. It’s the kind of illumination that lights love and makes everything else fall away into the background, into supporting roles— significant but subsidiary. I will never touch the bottom of the expansive, oceanic “thank you, thank you” I feel every time I get a ride and, in my more evolved moments, after I wipe-out.
And, yet, it’s often tempting to wonder what would’ve happened if I had known all of this sooner. What if I had encountered the nuances of this dance, of these particular sounds, and smells, sights, and bodily interactions sooner? Where would I have gone and who would I have become in the process? Now, writing this, it’s been a decade and a half and, by any technical measure, I’m still a mediocre surfer. If I’d started as a kid, when I first wanted to learn, I would be better now, practiced, and, as a result, expert. And sometimes in a day when the sun is still low over the water and the wind is calm when a knee-high wave peels under a lifting mist, tinted pink by morning’s bent light, I can almost feel what it might be like to be able to walk to the nose of that board with grace and expression. Sometimes, after those waves I think about that— what might have been. With a lot (a lot) of practice, that repeating thought has become like the pull of a slingshot that now, almost immediately, hurls me, again and again to the “thank you.” I thank time and the ocean and the agglomeration of circumstances that first kept me from this way of living and seeing and then, eventually, led me to it. But most of all, I am grateful that I am still so very “bad” at this beloved pastime. While I imagine it would be an amazing feeling to be able to do all the things I am trying very hard to learn to do, what’s really mattered has been the learning from scratch, the being not-good, not proficient. Instead, it’s been the relationship, the being madly, oftentimes literally, head over heels in love that turned out to be the tremendous gift of this mid-life love. It has re-created me and it keeps on doing it. It’s a recursive process of re-creation that is now apparent, not just in individual surf sessions but in the larger patterns of years and what happens during them— patterns of forgetting and re-learning about the nuance of season and swell, of heartbreak and healing, receiving and giving, weakening and strengthening, each in an endless whirling cycle— every instant resonant— but entirely new.
In this year, especially, I can’t help but feel that surfing (which, again, in my case means intermittent success and lots and lots of florid failures) has prepared me for spring. This spring’s rebirth comes after the year in which we were all reminded or, perhaps, made newly aware, that none of us can be sure of seeing these maple trees in flower or the early wildflowers (where I live, first meadow rues, and trout lilies, then trilliums and mayapples blooming on a woodland path. 
This winter of The Plague, reminders were everywhere— that we or someone dear to us might be gone before this pandemic ended, before the next solstice or equinox— the possibility of not-being feels almost as real as it is.
Almost as real as it has always been.
This time last year, when the broad shape of the threat was just emerging from the fog, I knew, without any doubt, despite the fear, and because of surfing, how I would want to spend my last months if these were to be those.
In love.
With my heart on the line.
In love with waves, with light, with shadow, but most of all with my people and the work I try to do well in the world. It’s work that surfing, and surfing poorly, has helped me do better and better, with ever-greater humility, always more present heart.
The beach, the place where waves end their lives on the sand, is an obvious edge, a liminal space between. We are all, always on some edge but there are places and times when we know change is imminent, real. And, although we think we know what might happen, unpredictable. This time of year, when spring is new, it’s easier to acknowledge our animal, planetary reality because we can feel it every time we walk out the door. And we can know the broad outlines of our seasonal direction.
It was colder than it is.
It was darker than it will be.
We who are still here all experienced yet another vernal equinox- this day in which we Earthlings can, regardless of mother tongue or merit, regardless of convention or culture, remember that we are together on this roundish rock.
Earth
Home
We live here on a smushed sphere where liquid water is the dominant feature, visible to any human eyeball looking casually at a globe.
But while we can see the longer days and smell the hyacinth or, where I live, the near-inebriating sweetness of Carolina Jasmine (native) and wisteria (invasive), there is so much we can’t perceive. The forces that bring the changes, the tilt of the earth, the manifold cosmic bodily interactions of gravity and inertia that make our home planet’s orbit and tilt what and where they are, even the sap rising in the Longleaf pines and sweet gums that border my urban yard or the flow of the Gulf Stream near the house where sit writing, in the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River basin—
these forces are all invisible. The spring is, as all seasons are, a visible manifestation of the complex interaction of huge and invisible forces.
Love, too is a huge and invisible force.
As is hate.
As are fear and hope and all of the currents we can see running through our life time, during our shift at or near the top of the food chain here on Earth, the source of all our food, all of our hearts and their rhythmically flowing fluid, all our chains of life and renewal. We are in the most predictable kind of time, spring follows winter as day follows night. And we are in the most unpredictable time. What will this hurricane season mean to my body, my home, my town, and all the live beings with whom I share this place? What consequences will come this season from the lengthening life-arcs of all the true-believing, well-intentioned, whip-smart youngsters who thought they meant to connect us all online? The ones, still so smart but no longer so young. Now full-grown robber barons holding onto the uncontrollable forces they’ve wrought, some still saying that more connections will only bring more good, on a larger scale in an endless recursive cycle of living our way towards techno-utopia. If only.
___
Do you know about Chaos Theory? Like all artists who reach to science for metaphor, please take this explanation with a boulder of salt. There is an idea, usually described as “sensitivity to initial conditions” or, more commonly “the butterfly effect.” It means that small, even infinitesimal actions or occurrences, over time, over the life of a system, or of an effort, or of a love, can spin the resulting cascade of events into a completely different realm of outcomes, of consequences. Those almost (or actually) invisible occurrences are not within our capacity to measure. Even if we could measure them, even if we could measure every butterfly wing’s flap above every rushing waterfall, blooming azalea, and fallow field everywhere, we probably still couldn’t predict the weather, or the surf, or our own lives, very far in advance. So we can’t know what will happen over time. For example, when we humans with our trained minds and big computers are trying to predict the weather or the waves we are very often wrong. Wrong about the sea and wrong about ourselves.
I recently had cause to read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us again. I read it once, in my young adulthood, I can’t remember where I was or why I picked it up— likely wanting something sweet to chase the beautiful but bitter truth-tonic of Silent Spring, which I read around the same time. Silent Spring warns of the dire dangers of our love affair with synthetic chemicals and their unintended consequences. The Sea Around Us is a poetic distillation of what was then the best scientific understanding of the oceans— where they came from and what they do, who lives there, and what remains unknown to us. It was 1951 when Carson published Sea, her first book, to near-universal praise. She devotes a chapter to the great currents, including the Gulf Stream. It sometimes comes closer, sometimes farther. Its changes, in turn, change everything about the place where I surf: the color and temperature of the water, the life that’s present, the weather, the waves— all can be altered by ephemeral forces of distant, invisible storms and by this perennial, invisible presence. The Gulf Stream is a warm water current which Carson called “that great and rapidly flowing river-in-the-sea.”
When two bodies of significantly different temperatures encounter one another and at least one of those bodies is fluid a fog results. It’s a straightforward meteorological fact. But Carson’s treatment of it is sheer poetry. She wrote of an encounter between her companions, aboard a sailboat called Albatross III, near two great ocean currents, the warm Gulf Stream and the cold waters of the George’s Bank (an undersea mountain range that runs from the coast off Nova Scotia south to a place off the shore of Cape Cod).
“[D]ay after day the Albatross moved in a small circular room, whose walls were soft gray curtains and whose floor had a glassy smoothness. Sometimes a petrel flew, with swallow-like flutterings, across this room, entering and leaving it by passing through its walls as if by sorcery. Evenings, the sun, before it set, was a pale silver disc hung in the ship’s rigging, the drifting streamers of fog picking up a diffused band of radiance and creating a scene that set us to searching our memories for quotations from Coleridge. The sense of a powerful presence, felt but not seen, its nearness made manifest but never revealed, was infinitely more dramatic than a direct encounter with the current.
Rachel Carson
The Sea Around Us (135)
An edge created by a great meeting. People meeting that invisible edge. She could have been writing about this morning, this year, this time.
A decade after Sea came out, in 1961, American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz first made the discovery that would generate new waves of perspective about what sort of certainty about our world was available to us as humans, as Earthlings. We can’t really guarantee the outcome of our action. We can’t really know the result of the systems we put into play.
We live in a time, this very spring, when great currents are meeting, each having its effect on the other. But the boundary, the fluid place where one runs into the other is, as fluid edges often do, generating a dense fog. Those of us who are paying attention and can admit to the truth of our emotional state, many of us are confused, unable to see exactly where we should go, unable to predict the effects of each direction, each set of actions interacting with the many vast and invisible forces surging around us. Like every meeting of currents, it is passage in a larger pattern and a time uniquely its own.
This is undeniably a period of sensitive dependence and, depending on how you count your history, we might well be in a set of initial conditions that will set us on the path to a new system. It will spin out beyond our individual control in ways we didn’t and couldn’t predict because all complex systems do. We are always in a system spinning out beyond our control. That prevents nor excuses us from doing what we can, from becoming lost, from failing, over and over again. With our hearts on the line. We must resist the temptation to look for final answers, for guarantees, for the desire to discover and cling to The One Static Truth that will free us from fog. While being lost, and failing might never become wholly comfortable, I have found the familiarity with the discomfort is better than anything you might have otherwise known. It has the potential to dissolve the barriers between your head and heart and, even more transformative between your heart and the many sacred beating hearts of the world, and the world itself.
We are always in the midst of chaos (just make note of this week’s forecast and have a look at next week’s weather). Chaos is forever the reality but it doesn’t have to be terrible. It can be liberatory.
___
I sit and await the nest wave, breathing myself up and out again, feeling the water underneath me, its rhythm every second the result of a mind-blowing convergence of forces, historical and contemporary. I paddle out a bit farther to get over an unusually big wave that’s breaking “outside,” seaward of where I’ve been waiting. If I were another surfer I would try to “turn and burn,” to turn fast and catch that outside, breaking wave. But I am me and I want to face it and the horizon and see it break over the nose of my board. As I crest the wave the water pitching off of the lip catches the light in such a way that it looks, impossibly, brighter than the sky— a film of thinnest sea transformed into its own celestial realm, is in some ways unpredictable and in many other ways utterly reliable. The wave adapts to changes in the ground without ever attaching to them. As I work to learn to read and respond to waves without thinking (takes too long), without prediction (impossible to perceive all the variables) perhaps, just maybe I can learn to get just a little better at doing the same in my land-dwelling life. As we all do, even Earth itself, I will drift towards and away from equity between light and shadow in my own heart, between hate and hope, between love and anger. The emotions are inevitable. How we flap our tiny wings (or our lips) is not.
The snow and cold have been here. These seeds have been here. Death and suffering and injustice have been here. And still, the water is warming again. We have seen failures on so many scales. We don’t need to regret them. We don’t need to figure out what might have been. We need to figure out what can be and how we might fail and breathe and, with intermittent success, love together.
