Canyon & Ocean | Two Run Tuesday -- A Quiet Place & Mystical Malibu

A Quiet Place

Tuesday.  

My second day of canyon independence.  I try a new run: start out the same way, but go left when I hit the fire road. It heads downhill for a very short time and then climbs, and looks as if it will continue to climb for a long ways. At the top of the first ascent, there's a sign listing different trails and destinations that all seem very appealing. One leads to a waterfall not far from here; that's definitely high on my list. But as it's late morning and already getting hot, I'm going to stay closer to home today.  

I turn onto the first trail I come to, a narrow rocky path that leads off almost perpendicularly to the fire road and down into a fold in the mountain.  By the time I'm 200 yards in, the main drag has disappeared and it's as if there's nothing else anywhere nearby. This could be the moon. It's unbelievably quiet. So quiet, I can't quite tell what it is I'm hearing. The sound of my own ears is like the "ocean" in a seashell. (I can imagine Eric's wry smile, saying that must be the sound the wind makes as it passes through my head). I can hear my heartbeat.

When lizards skitter in the dry grass just ahead of my footfalls I sometimes do a double take, as the sound can be creepily rattle-like.

A breeze passes through tall dry reeds and brush, and it's not a "whisper" as we often say  -- that's what you hear if you're hearing it as a part of ambient noise -- out here it's as if I am hearing the individual blades of grass brush against each other all at once, picking out each note in a chord, every single voice in a choir.  It's not one overall swishy sound, but a soft hubbub of many tiny clacks and clicks happening all at once. It's eerie and beautiful.

I go as far as a steep rocky outcropping full of wind holes and pause... just do nothing for awhile.

When I head back, the way out is steeper than I remembered...this is always more noticeable going up than down.  But this is a trail I'm eager to explore again, longer and farther. This is a quiet place, good for listening.

---

Mystical Malibu
the ocean has abundant mystery... and a cosmic sense of humor

You can't make this stuff up.  If I were creating a work of fiction - or just telling lies - I'd come up with something more plausible.

This story can stand on its own, but you'll get more of a sense of just how weird it is if you've first read The Button Jar and the Green Shoes.

I have to go back a ways... so I'm excerpting from a longer piece I've been working on.

***

February 2011
the kids and I visit Eric in LA, where he's working...

One afternoon, we drove out to Malibu.  We wanted to show the kids Point Dume, let them climb the rocks, play on the beach, look for dolphins. 
 
The section of Zuma Beach that leads out to Point Dume can be almost unrecognizable from day to day, and it shifts significantly with the seasons.  In the winter months, a bank of sand forms a substantial shelf on the beach, and along the surf line there’s a treasure trove of shells and stones and sea glass.
 
The kids ran barefoot in the sand, jumping off the sand “cliff,” and letting the sea foam burble over their feet and soak their pant legs, which dried crunchy with salt in the sun.  They lured the seagulls with cheesy popcorn, then chased them into huge whirling clouds.

We stayed until it was almost dark.  I tried to picture what Point Dume must have been like before modest midcentury homes were replaced with sleek modernist mansions.  Even before that.  Way before. Point Dume was still completely wild at the turn of the 20th century.  What was it like when a person could walk all the way out through tall grasses, stand in the wind on the cliffs and watch the sun set fire to the clouds and the waves as it goes down, when there was nothing but the mountains, ocean, sky, and sea creatures around her?  Before the very name Malibu connoted fancy people, plastic surgeons and foreign cars.  Who lived here then?
 
I took a walk down toward the Point, and wondered what a life in LA might look like for us. Obviously, there's a lot that's appealing. But as I strolled past bleached and browned surfer types and families of kids building sandcastles, I wore my ubiquitous Northeast-Urbanite-in-February pallor like a badge of honor. As if it proved I was working tormentedly in darkened black box theaters, or toiling in the wee hours by the blue glow of a laptop; as if it validated me as an artist of some seriousness. 
 
Who would I be if I weren’t a New Yorker? 
 
In truth, I was mostly an at-home mom, struggling to find space in my life to be an artist – actor or writer - at all.  Part of me wanted to take a huge leap just to shake things up – maybe this was the time to make a move, and maybe LA would be good for us.  I was attracted to the idea (or was it just the weather?).  I certainly felt a sense of spaciousness here, of breath, of possibility -- but an actress who moves to LA at 39?  Hm. Would I be happy writing here?

Suddenly a large wave rolled in and soaked my boots, filling them with salt and sand. I slid my feet out, peeled off my socks. 

The tide was out and the beach was gritty with shells and stones.  I stooped frequently to rake my fingers through the glimmering gravel, collecting handfuls of smooth, cloudy shards of green, brown and white sea glass -- plus two pieces that seemed particularly special -- one cobalt blue and one deep red.  I decided those two were my talismans -- reminders of all that’s wonderful about this place, assurances that I could make a life here. It would be a good move for Eric, and for me too. I could be here and still be…myself.
 
I slipped my treasures into my pocket with the other shells and things and headed back to our beach blanket.

When we got back to the apartment I emptied the contents of my pockets; Violet and I compared loot.  I had tons of sea glass, but no blue and no red. 
 
Those two had gone missing.
 
***
 
Not long after the kids and I got back to New York, Eric booked a pilot.  
 
A month later the show was picked up, and exactly six months after our trip, we had moved. We found a house on the fly, a quirky little place, built into the hills of Studio City. 

I fell madly in love with southern California that year. My actor life was non-existent, but I started writing up a storm. I wasn't sure where any of it was going... but it was sunny every day, my energy soared and my spirit felt surprisingly at home.
 
I ran on the beach at least once a week, swam in Malibu year round; and I had extraordinary, almost mystical moments there, like the one I told about in The Button Jar and the Green Shoes. 

​And this one:

August 2012
 
While we were living in LA, my pregnant sister, in New York, developed severe preeclampsia at 29 weeks. 
 
In the middle of the night ten days later, my wee niece was born and moved into high level NICU. Three pounds. Healthy -- but still, things were very scary, and I felt so far away. We went to bed, and in the morning I said, “I need to be at the ocean.”  To celebrate. And to pray.

We were hanging out on the beach at Point Dume, when all of sudden there was a big commotion.

Sunbathers were jumping up and grabbing their cameras, everyone running to the edge of the water, laughing and amazed, crying, “Oh! Wow!”

Just beyond the breakers were about a dozen dolphins, putting on quite a show: cresting and jumping in the surf, swimming in circles together, serious bottlenose gamboling for all to see.  It was late afternoon, the tide was in, and the sun was still high and pale. The waves were huge, making lofty curls and breaking twenty yards or so off shore.

An enormous wave rose out of the foam, the late afternoon sun shining through it. Silhouetted in its perfect, clear, blue-green barrel, riding in tandem, surfing the wave, were a pair of dolphins, big and small – a mother and her baby.

***

Eric’s show only lasted one season, and we returned to NYC -- but I left kicking and screaming.

Now I try to retreat to southern California at least once a year to write, to work uninterrupted all day, without laundry or school pick ups or meals to prepare.  To be mindfully -- sometimes uncomfortably -- alone.  To be at the beach and walk or run and get in the ocean.  But mainly, to be without the high frequency vibration of NYC around me.  I breathe differently, and find a different kind of internal space in this external space.
 
On one such trip, I was working on something that felt…important for me, like a breakthrough as a writer, but it was driving me crazy.  I went on retreat to make a final push to finish it.
 
June 2014

After a long day of writing, I drove out to Zuma and walked down to Point Dume, mulling over ideas, possible solutions to vexing holes in the text, questioning whether the thing actually held any promise.  And as I strolled, I looked, as always, for little gems in the sand.  I didn’t expect to find much because it was June, and in my experience, summer isn’t the time for finding shells and sea glass at Zuma.  It holds onto its best treasures till winter.
 
So I walked and combed and mulled. By the time I turned and started home, I’d pretty much concluded that my whole project was a bust, that I’d wasted months of my life, and that maybe, after all, I just was not doing the right thing with my life. That I really should throw in the towel and get a damn day job.  These are not unusual feelings, but I was particularly mired in them that day.
 
I said, sort of out loud, though I hate to say prayed, not because I don’t believe in prayer, but because whether or not this is theologically sound, I sort of feel that Prayer should be reserved for the real things, the important stuff, personally and globally -- for the health and safety of my family, for the refugees, for clean water resources around the world, for an end to our out of control gun issues.  I’m frankly troubled by the notion that God would bother to help an artist and yet not intervene when there’s a deadly tsunami or terror attack or cancer.
 
But anyway, let’s say I gave voice to the silly thought that if I could just have a sign that I was on the right track I would feel better.  I could keep going.  And then I sort of sheepishly said, I wish I had a piece of cobalt glass like the special one I found and lost here a few years back.
 
I mean, that’s stupid, but afterall, this is where the green shoe turned up. 

I immediately caught myself in this foolishness and thought, oh boy, that was really dumb, and totally self-defeating, because now if I don’t find one, I’ll have to assume that I’m, like, cosmically on the wrong track, and just give up.
 
“Haha. Just kidding. Didn't mean it!” I told the ocean, or whoever.

I took about two steps forward and there, at my feet in the sand, was a little piece of cobalt glass. 
 
I snatched it out of the wet sand with the jealousy of a side-glancing seagull darting for a piece of cheesy popcorn; like, if I didn’t snare it that instant, some other hungry, superstitious, desperate, slightly ashamed artist would swoop in and take it.  
 
“Thanks,” I whispered.
 
And then. 
 
I had no sooner stood up and taken a step, than a wave washed over my feet and deposited, I kid you not, a big-ass piece of cobalt sea glass right on my toe.

the cobalt sea glass... and the green shoe... in my treasure dish on my little nightstand altar at home in NYC

***

​The sophisticated and prosperous Chumash -- “seashell people” -- lived in Malibu for thousands of years before the mission system devastated their culture. 

I became fascinated with them when we were living out here and came upon some Chumash history placards in Malibu Creek State Park. 

The word Malibu is thought to have originated with the name of a Chumash Village --  (hu-)mal-iwu (pronounced “Umalibu” by the Spanish), which means, “The surf makes a lot of noise all the time over there.”
 
Though the origin of the name Point Dume is uncertain, there’s no doubt that the point was culturally significant for the Chumash.  Fernando Librado, a Chumash elder in the early 1900s reported that Point Dume was a sun shrine, and that its name stems from “sumo” the Chumash word for abundance.

At the Chumash Museum in Thousand Oaks

***
October 2015

​Shortly after I got back to NYC from this last summer’s “unscripted” adventures, I was invited to lead yoga on a women’s retreat -- In Malibu.  Right on Point Dume. 

Almost too good to be true. 
 
This group of dynamic, accomplished women – mostly creative types, all of them mothers -- gathered for a little R&R, time to talk about their projects, do some yoga, eat cheese, drink wine, and spend some quality hours in what came to be known as The Hot Tub of Truth.
 
I was so thrilled just to be invited, to be part of the retreat. But in my capacity as yoga teacher, I really wanted to show up as someone who has her shit together, at least enough to appear to have something legit to offer in the way of yogic wisdom for mothers and artists.
 
Each woman there was in a period of transition; a kid going off to college, a new business, an emerging artistic endeavor. And we were all also, I realized, people who have a somewhat complicated relationship to the concept of success – which is to say, each of us has very specific notions about what succeeding would look like in her specific field, and a sense of urgency about it, be it motherhood, art, marriage, entrepreneurship.
 
For me, one of the most powerful benefits of yoga practice has always been that when I practice regularly, even on the most hectic, exhausting, depleting of days, it brings me back to myself in a place of groundedness, a feeling of connection to Source, to prana (life force), to breath, to my creative heart, to the voice of God, the mystery in the everyday, and to a blissful stillness that is present and available even as life swirls and churns around me if I’m just willing to let go of the crazy for a few minutes. At its best, it feels unto itself like a kind of success – in the sense that true success is not an end point, but joy and awareness on the way.  (See: bench on Topanga trail from yesterday's post)
 
I wanted to bring something centering, calming and encouraging, some yoga tool for these women to use on their own journeys.
 
In yogic thought, the root chakra, at the base of the spine, corresponds to your sense of stability, security -- physically, emotionally, spiritually – it helps you feel grounded.  And so, I used as the frame of our practice an affirmation that can help find balance in the root chakra –
 
I am exactly where I need to be.
 
I have this phrase posted above my desk and consult it regularly as a reminder to let go of hurry and comparison and expectation, and just be in the work, the practice.  I believe it in a fundamental way. I was excited to share how this idea can inform not only the physical practice of yoga, but the way we live our lives, and feel about ourselves. 
 
We practiced in a peaceful white room, with the doors open on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the sound of the waves setting the rhythm of our inhales and exhales.  (hu-)mal-iwu! 
 
The weather was divine. 
 
Our first morning, I went out for a jog along the water.  It was only early fall, but the beach seemed already to be transitioning toward it’s winter shape; the rising ledge of sand was too soft for a good run, so I ran right in the edge of the surf. 
 
All of a sudden a big wave came and knocked me right off my feet. I went tumbling into the water, gasping, my sports bra filling with gravelly sand, my knee scraped. It wasn’t till I righted myself that I realized my Ray-bans had been ripped off my face and pulled out to sea. My $7 H&M sunglasses rested comfortably on my nightstand back at home, and the only expensive pair of shades, classic tortoiseshell wayfarers, I ever owned now swam with the fishes. (That I had not bought these sunglasses in the first place but found them on the subway 10 years ago seemed entirely beside the point).
 
Point Dume giveth and Point Dume taketh away.

I stood there panting, soaked and sandy, staring sunglass-less at the bright ocean. I had to laugh.

A feeling gripped me, I cannot leave here.
 
The second morning, I again went down to the beach early. It was overcast, but warm.

I did yoga out by the Point.  As I practiced, I spent a long time developing language for the postures and concepts I wanted to explore with the women that day, finding ways to give deeper and more precise instruction. 
 
Honestly, I didn’t feel good about the way I’d taught the day before. Didn’t feel like I’d communicated well, or even sounded like I knew what the hell I was doing.
 
As I practiced on the beach that morning, I asked myself, in these words, “Why am I fighting the failure demon so hard right now?”
 
That afternoon, after yoga, we all gathered together for a long gab session.  One of the members of the group, who is very intuitive, helped guide the discussion by asking evocative questions and offering the kind of wisdom that feels when you hear it like it should have been obvious all along.
 
As we sat there I found myself becoming very introverted and quiet and not wanting to participate. In truth, I was feeling kind of pissy and closed off. 
 
Now, believe me, I know I had not one thing to be pissed off about in that moment. Only 6 weeks after I left beloved Topanga, here I was, back at the ocean, at my favorite beach in the world, with these fantastic women who will now be eternal friends, leading yoga for creative types and mothers which is the perfect nexus for me, my sweet spot as a teacher, hunkered down together with wine or coffee, under plush blankets in a room made of windows, watching a gorgeous storm gather out over the pacific.
 
What is wrong with me?  I wondered.  Why do I have this knot in my stomach? 
 
Because I’m a fraud, I thought. I have nothing figured out. I never finish anything. I’m the slowest worker, the latest bloomer. I have so many projects, whole genres, in various stages of development. I’m a Jill of all trades master of none. I never make much money. I’m in my early 40s and still don’t have a proper career.  I have a great life in New York, and yet I’m so restless. All I can think about is being out here again, but I’m scared to leave my home of 20 years.  Being a New Yorker is the only thing that makes me even a little cool.
 
These thoughtful women were opening their hearts and lives and secrets to each other, and I wanted to be a part of the conversation but I felt like I couldn’t say these things and still be taken seriously.
 
How can I admit that the very thing I’ve been teaching them – the mantra “I am exactly where I need to be” -- while I believe it to be True, isn’t working for me right now?  That in fact, both in a literal, physical sense and a creative one I didn’t feel at all that, at 43, I am where I should be? 
 
Dare I confess this?
 
The woman leading the group turned to me, suddenly, directly and said, “Jenny. Yes. I don’t know what this means exactly, but just… Yes.”
 
I was startled. “Well, I guess it means I should say what I’m thinking, which is that… I’m full of shit.  None of what I'm teaching feels true to me.  Not only am I not exactly where I need to be, I don’t know where I am, and I think I may be… nowhere.”  My face burned.
 
“You have let go of your demons of failure,” she said.
 
Just like that. 
 
Then one of the women in the group, a dear friend, remarked that she felt like sometimes I hold things a little too tightly, that maybe I have to not be such a "perfectionist" – (I hate that word, because it’s usually just an insufferable humblebrag – so lets just say, I need to stop obsessing over details…) and be more willing to just put things out there and start the flow.
 
“You don’t understand,” I lashed out.  “I’m not afraid to fail, I’m afraid I have failed. At almost everything I set out to do.  I’m overwhelmed and scattered all the time.  Nothing ever really seems to take hold, make demonstrable progress, find success, whatever than means.  Every new project is exciting at first and pretty soon just feels like one more thing.
 
I started crying, big gasping sobs.  I felt nauseated.  I was so embarrassed.  Bad yoga teacher, I scolded myself.  Bad, bad yoga teacher.
 
I went down to the beach afterward and took a walk.  It was raining now, and very gray.  Out over the ocean, the black clouds hung heavy and I could see a broad shaft of rain moving along the coast, passing into the mountains to the east. 
 
 “Sorry to be so difficult, so... grabby” I said to my old friend the ocean, “But here I am again, and I really need a reassurance… again… that I’m on the right path, or ANY path, really, that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, that I am exactly where I need to be.  I’m not asking for anything specific – I’m not fussy about green shoes or blue glass or whatever.  Just, you know… I’ll know it when I see it.”
 
Down near the point, the beach was littered with knots of black-green kelp, broken driftwood; it looked like the ocean had vomited up everything dark and tangled within it.  The storm at sea had wreaked havoc in the space of a few hours. The surf line was an entirely different shape than it had been that very morning and the beach was black and damp far up onto shore.  The ridge of sand was high and jagged.
 
And then I saw them.  Within a space of fifty yards, right along the ledge of sand -- three dead birds.
 
Seagulls, right in a row.  And not just dead, but mangled: gray and oily, deflated, slender necks broken and wrenched at odd angles, wings twisted, beaks open.  They were plastered up against the sand shelf as if they had been just sitting there, maybe sleeping or preening, when a sneaker wave swelled ashore and slammed their light bodies, their fragile bones, brutally into the ridge. 
 
“Seriously?” I cried out. “DEAD BIRDS?! That’s what you’ve got for me? I ask for a small token of encouragement, a little Malibu magic and I get DEAD BIRDS? No green shoe, no blue glass, no dolphin families?  Just three violently deceased seagulls?”
 
That night I couldn’t sleep. 

It was like, a fully Dickensian haunting. The ghosts of essays past and blog posts present, the black-cloaked specter of careers that will never be because I couldn’t get my damn act together. The rag pickers, the laundresses and charwomen, laughing as they sorted through the worst drafts of my old poems, work I was too precious about, auditions I blew, collaborations I botched.
 
“Open my bundle, Old Joe, and let me know the value of it!”
 
All the things I should have been by now.  Every time I upbraided my children undeservedly.  My envy.  My lofty yogic pontifications. My selfishness and discontent. My naval gazing.
 
"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.”
 
I tossed and turned and sweated. The ocean outside my shuttered door sounded rough and endless, dreadful.
 
Somehow I finally fell asleep I guess, because suddenly I was waking up, not to the sound of Christmas church bells, like Scrooge, but to peacefully lapping waves, chirping birds, and early sunlight streaming through the slatted window.  Everyone else was still asleep.

I took my journal, a pen, and a towel and tiptoed out the door and down the long steep path to the beach. It was an absolutely clear, blue, mistless, smogless morning.  A Monday.  The beach was empty.
 
I sat on the beach and wrote in my journal for a long time.  I recounted the strange events of the day before.  And I felt, actually, at peace.  Like everything was ok. Like, in Rilke's famous words --
 
“In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”
 
I went for a long run.  I felt inexplicably light, viscerally unburdened.
 
I ran all the way down Zuma, along PCH, then turned and ran back out toward the Point. 
 
The beach was unrecognizable from the day before. As I neared the Point, I noticed that the whole area, which yesterday had been like something out of a Hitchcock film, was pristine.  No seaweed, no foul fowl corpses. Just flat, white, clean sand –
 
and glittering with a gravel of small stones and sea glass. 
 
I ended my run and bent down to look for little goodies.  Before long I had a large handful of sea glass, the usual green, brown, white. I also found a very interesting orange one. 
 
In my head, I started writing about all this, amusing myself with a debate over which outcome would make a better ending to the story?  She finds a beautiful piece of cobalt glass... or not?  A little too neat, maybe? Too big-red-bow-ish? Or, what if something truly implausible happened… a seagull drops a piece of cobalt glass at my feet.  Oh, better yet – surprise twist – my Ray-bans wash up. A dolphin, wearing my sunglasses swims by. I was rather entertained by these thoughts, but also, given my history with the place, aware that anything can happen.
 
Just then, someone spoke.
 
“Did you come out at dawn to get all the good ones?”
 
I looked up.  A jogger was coming toward me; a man, probably in his fifties.
 
I laughed and said,  “Hey, I got up really early to be the first one here.”
 
He stopped near me, and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his arm.  “You know,” he said, “it only counts if you find the blue or the red ones.”
 
I jumped up, whirled around and punched this perfect stranger; socked him square in the shoulder.
 
“That’s exactly what I’m looking for,” I exclaimed.
 
“Sure,” he said, not seeming to find any of this strange, even getting clocked by a strange woman at the beach. “Those are the most special.  The blue are very old bottles and the red are the taillights of cars from the 1950s and 60s.”
 
He told me about his huge collection of sea glass. Jars and jars full of every color.  And about a woman he met on the beach one day who had just found a large pink sea glass egg.
 
“Don’t worry,” he said, “You’ll find some.”  And he jogged on.
 
Naturally, I found a little blue sliver just a few minutes after he passed by.  But really the magic was in the moment with the jogger.
 
About a half hour later, I was getting ready to climb back up to the house. It was past time to pack and go to the airport. I stood at the edge of the water and had that thought again – I cannot leave here. 
 
I debated whether to get in the water and swim. While I stood there weighing the relative merits of no last swim vs. a five-hour flight with sand in my hair, the jogger came by again.
 
“Hey - I found one!”  I called out to him.
 
He nodded as if this was obvious.  Then he stopped and came over to me. 
 
“Live around here?”  He asked
 
“No,” I said, “New York. I used to live out here though. And this was my favorite beach. I come back whenever I can.”
 
He asked what had brought me there now, and I told him about the retreat. Then, inexplicably, I went into confessional mode. “Sometimes when I’m here, on this beach, I get this feeling that -- I physically cannot leave.”
 
He nodded, as if this too, were a simple, plain truth.  
 
Then he said, “A member of the Chumash Nation told me, ‘Once you have heard the call of the dolphins of Malibu you are changed. You can try to explain it to people, but…” he shook his head knowingly, “they won’t understand.’” 
 
He shrugged, and went on. “The ocean is calling your heart back to it, and now -- you need to be here.” 
 
I stood in stunned silence. My heart was pounding, and I could barely breathe but for some reason I felt compelled to act nonchalant.  I’d already punched the guy, how much weirder could I seem?
 
He held up his hand for a high five. “We have a saying at Zuma beach – girls don’t leave till they take a swim.  Now get in the water.”  He jogged away with a wave.
 
After a moment, I called out after him.  “My name is Jenny,” I said. “I write a blog.  You’re going to show up in it.”
 
He yelled his name over his shoulder and said, “I’m on Facebook. You’ll find me...”
 
***
 
I’ve only told that story to a couple people. I’m afraid it makes me sound just a wee bit... touched. I’ve been eager to share it with the women who were on the retreat with me, but it’s been so difficult to get it all written down. 
 
One day, weeks after the retreat, as I was going over it all again, trying to figure out how to write about it without sounding hopelessly precious and possibly insane, I got a surprise package in the mail from one of those very women.  It sat all day in a pile of mail. 
 
That evening, I was in the kitchen, dinner on the stove, kids at the dining table doing homework and squabbling. My laptop was perched on the counter, on top of the mail pile and permission slips and homework with milk spilled on it, where in the midst of the suppertime chaos I was trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of writing. Yoga retreats, Topanga Canyon, the glittering Pacific...they all seemed far away, and here I was, in my real, messy, full, frustrating, good life.

I slipped the package out from under my computer and opened it.
 
Inside was a slim, shiny silver bracelet, inscribed on the back --
 
I am exactly where I need to be
 
***

---

In Topanga on Tuesday, wearing the bracelet, inscribed with "I am exactly where I need to be"

July 2016... Tuesday 

After my morning run in the canyon and some writing time, we head out to the beach.  It's Eric's first visit to the ocean since he arrived, and his turn to choose. He wants to go out to Malibu. It's my first trip to Point Dume since we got here, and my stomach flutters as we drive toward it along PCH. 

The water is unusually calm, and the kids swim and boogie board for awhile, then Eric and Hutch take off down the beach to go out to the Point.

I'm watching Violet play at the edge of the water.  She's a little scavenger and creature seeker, forever digging up sand crabs, naming them things like Sandy and Crabby and Harold, making them temporary pets. 

I sit there remembering the craziness of my last visit, and going over the essay I still had not finished about what happened on the beach that weekend. I recall the silly ideas I'd had about what would make the best ending to the story. I think about the green shoe, and the cobalt glass and the dolphins. 

Violet has been intently fishing around in one spot for a while. Now she gets up and runs over to me with something in her hand. I expect to be introduced to a new friend, maybe Salty or Muffin this time.

"I thought maybe you would want these," she says, and hands me -- pinky swear -- a perfect pair of Ray-ban wayfarers, dripping wet and sandy, right out of the ocean.

I wear them on my second run that day, along the edge of the water, down to the Point and back.