Brain massage

The journey within a journey continues. When I got an inspirational and artistic moment (well in my mind anyway...) I asked one of my fellow backpackers who I was with on this beach in Manual Antonio, Costa Rica to take a photo of me with the sea to compare all the shades of blue, grey and white which I had been staring at, with those colour blends in my surfing shorts, she actually went one better than that. She captured a moment. She captured me in the middle of a brain massage.

I ended up standing there facing the open ocean for at least ten minutes, looking out towards the Islas Gemelas and the horizon beyond, looking left and right for the length of the fine sandy sprawl in the long, slow curve bay, the lapping water manouvering the sand so that my heels sank and dug in to it so that it swarmed around my ankles. I watched for the swells, recognising the incoming tide creeping up to the bottoms of my shorts. The waves glinted under the sunlight that was trying to break through the clouds like ripples of foil.

Cloudy it was, but the heat prevailed. And my brain massage continued. Kneading and rubbing continued, promoting my mind's circulation. I stood there motionless in the rush and lap of the surf around my legs as the clouds gained potence and ganged up on little me below. But I stood firm and stood in defiance. Even when they loom in and start raining down on you, trying to suppress your beach day in the glee of it's rumble, even then they will not beat you. They will realise that you are free to do what you want, that the massage has balmed a shield in to you.

I read a short while before departing a saying that 'we travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us'. That is what I felt  as I mellowly turned back up the sand, a grin breaking on my face like the waves broke on the shore - slowly but surely. My impulsive brain massage did not ease any aches, instead it quite simply kept me moving on while I stood still; every sense was alive, nothing around me escaped me. Maybe the masseur was Oliver Wendell Holmes if you have read the quote in my header above. I realised that I really don't just exist, and that instead I live.