Paying attention
This one's for my sun worshipers
A little over a decade ago, in the foothills of the Himalayas, I met a man who spent hours of his day staring at the sun. I was part of a group of teenagers. We had been hiking for weeks, sleeping in tents and making rice on a camp stove, tending blisters and telling stories, making our way through jungles and across boulder fields and around glaciers. We emerged from the top of a canyon into an open bowl of snow-dusted meadow, surrounded on all sides by towering peaks. And there, at what felt to us like the end of the earth, was a man with his flock of sheep. He invited us in to his home for chai, where he told us about his spiritual practice: looking at the sun.
This story always raises questions for people. They want to know the specifics: what did his eyes look like, how old was he, how long had he been doing this? Did he wear sunglasses?
If I’m being honest, I am more interested in the poetics of his sungazing than the mechanics. But here’s what I do remember: I remember that he seemed old to me (I was nineteen, so most people seemed old to me), and that he had started a long time ago, first with just a few seconds a day, then a few minutes, and eventually hours. I remember that he said the sun gave him energy, it was the source of his life force. I remember when we walked back out into the meadow, we all turned up toward the sun in unison, newly reverent of its potency.
The twentieth century philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil believed that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” She wrote about how the main point of school is that it teaches you how to focus, even if it feels futile — you might stare at a geometry proof for hours and never figure out the answer, but you’ve still succeeded because you’ve given it your undivided attention. You’re training yourself to concentrate, which is good preparation for learning how to pray.
The sun is an obviously good metaphor for a traditional idea of “god.” It’s a consistent source of warmth, light, energy. But also, it’s an entity with the power to burn, to destroy. It demands respect. It’s there even when you can’t see it. All life on earth revolves around it, emanates from it. It feels good to bask in its glow. People have been worshiping (though not necessarily staring at) the sun for as long as people have been worshiping, which as far as I’m concerned is basically forever.
The sungazer I met in the Himalayas was totally intent on our solar epicenter. He fixed his attention on that single flaming ball of hot plasma 93 million miles away so entirely that it sustained him, energized him, gave him a purpose. To him, that was a sacred act of devotion.
If you know me well, this is the part where you think I’m going to say that I, too, have started staring at the sun. I’ve been a sun worshiper for a long time, but I haven’t ventured beyond split-second eye contact. Instead, in the years since I learned to surf, I have found myself fixated on a different awe-inspiring natural wonder: the horizon.
It is commonly believed that I started surfing too late to ever be truly good. William Finnegan wrote in his epic surf travelogue Barbarian Days: “People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.” I started at the geriatric age of twenty-seven after decades of resisting my family’s rabid enthusiasm for the activity. (The double-edged sword of having cool parents is that when you rebel against them — as one absolutely must — you end up missing out on a lot of fun.)
But the certainty of my belated mediocrity didn’t matter to me. I had spent too much time doing things I was good at, trying to be the best. Now here I was, doing something I actually loved.
Not that there hasn’t been pain and sorrow, and many days when I threatened to quit. Surfing is my ficklest friend. The frustration of surfing is that you have to re-learn it every time you go — the waves, wind, tide, sand, rocks, and crowd can all change overnight. So you arrive feeling confident from the day before and find yourself unable to paddle, position yourself, or turn with the same confidence you had mere hours earlier. I have had countless infuriating sessions where I struggle endlessly and catch nothing, blame it on my board or the tide or the breeze, anything but myself, and dunk under the water to scream where no one can hear me. I have cried on days when I was out in waves beyond my skill level, sure I wouldn’t be able to get back to shore alive. I’ve snapped at my family when they try to give me gentle instructions, which undoubtedly I needed, and told them to please, oh my god, leave me alone.
But I have also felt, for brief perfect moments, like I could walk on water. I have felt the massive, boundless force of the ocean conspiring to pick me up and spin me around and dance with me. I have felt the salt water buoying me, cradling me gently on its surface. I have felt that maybe if I just went surfing every day, practicing this pointless art form that I know I’ll never be excellent at, it would be a good use of my life.
And perhaps most importantly, I have spent hours, probably hundreds of them, staring intently at the horizon, anticipating, studying, discerning. This is mostly what surfers do. Sit in wait, hoping that a storm hundreds of miles away has created enough energy and moved in just the right direction for its shockwaves to arrive exactly where you happen to be floating, and examining the horizon to detect the trace of an impending ripple.
If prayer is attention then the horizon is our mantra, our psalm. Learning which tiny distant wrinkles will rise up to form a curl, how the light moves across the face of a wave, where to be in the water and how to stay there, it all requires constant, patient, vigilant concentration. If you look away at the wrong time, you could suddenly find yourself facing an impending wall of water. Even the best surfers in the world don’t always get it exactly right; they’re learning as long as they’re surfing.
Maybe surfing is praying, or maybe it’s just surfing, and surfing feels great. The reason I love Simone Weil’s take on prayer as attention is that it suggests that even if all the stuff I do that feels like prayer isn’t (which Weil probably would believe — she was pretty uncompromising), at least it’s still good practice. Whether it’s staring at the sun, or scanning the horizon, or watching a bumble bee hum from bud to bud, it’s always good to pay attention.
You won’t hear from me for a few weeks, because I’m going on a sacred pilgrimage…aka a surf trip :) See you in March!