Epic Tides, the North Shore, and Kahunas

It was fun reading in my Capt'n Jack's Tide and Current Almanac of Puget Sound yesterday. To me, the tides played right into the epic swell at North Shore in Oahu.

It's why I love reading tide books. The computer, for the most part, as most of us use it - I'd imagine - at any rate, shows today's tide. Maybe even a few days out. Whatever. But books, why those show a year ahead.  So it's fun to hang over coffee in the morning before Dawn Patrol or after a day's session in a pub with a brew while flipping through my tide books. Yesterday was the largest tide of the month so far, even beating out the full moon tide. Now I'm sure everybody knows that, but to me, it was a fun thing to read and to contemplate. I've been feeling the swell coming to the North Shore of Oahu  for awhile. About 3 months actually. It's a chi gung thing, a way of getting in tune with the ocean that goes beyond what we normally think of as science and enters the realms of what we historically and culturally  would have considered to be the stomping grounds of the Kahuna. It is, a zone, of magic. What else do you call something like that?

I find the mystery and mysticism of the Kahunas to be utterly fascinating. They were, to me, Hawaii's shamans. People who understood more than most see. In the case of the surfing Kahunas, these were, to my understanding, the guys who knew all about the sea. Sure, I've heard that they could tell when the waves were coming but they also knew about tides and swells and when and where the fish were, for all of that was related, thus, more than simply picking perfect days to surf, they helped feed the villages by knowing when are where to fish. And, I know from personal experience, that each and every one of those things can be done. One simply has to know how. And, to train. The secret, by the way, is in the breath. But the secret beyond the secret is that the secret is beyond the breath, at the level of feeling motion in stillness, and stillness in motion.

Chi gung, shamanism, and Kahunas all share something. Each is a way to work with the energy around us. And so, using any of those systems, which, in so many ways share so much, one can do something like sense huge swells coming. In that way, it's not unlike Bodhi  (Patrick Swayzee's character in Point Break). In that movie, the character Bodhi could feel the 50 year storm coming. He knew where it would be and when. He was, in his way, a chi gung master, a shaman, a kahuna, or, as I like to think of it, a soul surfer (okay, the character did the whole bank robbery thing but that's beyond this discussion).

Yesterday, December 8th, was a last quarter moon, moon on the equator. A time of radically high tides. And, the epic waves at North Shore rose to dance.

Bodaciously Stoked,

Lily of the Valley