The Ocean of Non-attachment

I am at the ocean. Yes, in January.   I recommend it.  Divorced from laying in the sun or running in the waves there is an even clearer sense of the eternal majesty of the waves and their reminders of the eternal majesty of the Divine.

For me there are spiritual practices associated with the ocean.   One is the practice of non-attachment.   Buddhist monks have a practice of spending days painstakingly making beautiful Mandala designs out of different colored sands.   Then after their careful work is completed they ceremonially destroy the work.  This is a ritual expression of non-attachment and the impermanence of all things.

Long ago when my daughter was small we would come to this same place and we would enjoy making a sandcastle and then we would watch the tide come in and destroy it.   Later with her stepfather and her step brother we would build an even bigger one with an extensive moat system and we would race to complete it before the incoming tide would come for it.   We would play at defending it, and then finally stand back and watch its ultimate destruction.   A reminder that nothing man made is actually permanent or stands against the sands of time.  After my divorce, I came and built a sand castle just to watch it wash away, just to acknowledge the years of work I had put into the marriage and then to release it.  There is a funny kind of peace I cannot properly explain about knowing that in the end it all, everything we do, returns to the ocean.

There is another beach ritual that goes hand in hand with this.  It is the throwing of the rocks in the ocean.   Some year when I was full of angst and troubles I stood watching the crashing waves and the majesty of God.  I began to pick up rocks and name them for the troubles of my year, and then to “give them to God” by throwing them into the ocean.  I would do this till I could think of nothing more to throw in.  I would leave feeling lighter - emptied.  I value the practice so much I often recommend it to clients  to release  grief or anger.

I remember one year I picked a particularly big rock to throw in to represent a whole ordeal I had gone through for more than a year.  I happened to throw it right as a gigantic wave came and even though I backed up to not get water in my shoes the wave brought that rock back and deposited at my feet!  I said:  “I understand God, I am not as done with that one as I wish.  I have not fully let it go.”   And sure enough during the next year, at moments I could feel that thing washing up at my feet again.    I’m happy that this year I am having a year where there is nothing I feel I need to throw in the ocean.  I think I have been learning to throw them into the eternal ocean all year long.