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near Monpiche, Ecuador

7.4.14 On Freedom

Everyone told us we had to check out Playa Negra, the black beach, just outside of Monpiche. My Argentinian friend and I were traveling together during our week off from classes and found ourselves in this small little beach town along the central-northern coast of Ecuador; a town where life moves slow as molasses and the air is thick as honey.

We took off our shoes and walked to the black beach, through a jungley dirt road, to a paved one, past a pasture of horses, up a steep hill, and down the other side to a beach lined with palms and tropical grasses. The water was dark blue and the waves were twice the size of those in Monpiche. We were the only people there.

The sand exists here only in relation to the sun; without the sun, the black sand is dull. But when the sun peaks out from behind the clouds, the sand sparkles. Like fairy dust. You look across the beach and it’s all black sand sparkling with tiny flecks of stardust. A galaxy in your hands, melting through your fingers, plastered to your feet. You touch it with fingers outspread and your palm becomes a landing pad for refracted sunlight, in subtle tints of red, yellow and blue.

In the sand near the water there live thousands of sand snails, whose livelihoods are dominated by the constant push and pull of the tide. The tide comes in and they burrow themselves beneath the surface. The tide goes out and they flip around to release their little snail mustaches to catch whatever nutrients the tide carries. When the tide passes, they crawl up hill a bit, burrow and wait for the next wave. It goes on and on like this. Burrowing and mustache-ing with the never-ending current. Forever I guess.

We sat on the black stardust and threw clumps at a nearby rock as the waves came in and out, tickling our toes with foamy tongues. We buried ourselves in the stardust, letting it dry and harden on our legs until it looked like we walked on sticks of petrified space. We watched as waves came and washed it all off, exposing our shy pink skin. I drew spirals and maps in the stardust and watched emotionlessly as the tide erased it all. In and out, in and out. Wave after wave after wave.

Then that feeling happened in my gut: the feeling of endless meaninglessness. It’s like a metal anchor sinks and hovers below my navel, reminding me that nothing really matters; that my actions and choices don’t really matter as much as I’d like to think they do. It’s an uneasy and haunting feeling I seem to know too well. I met the feeling the first time I ate mushrooms and witnessed time passing without intention, realizing the infinitude of possibilities and the microscopic reality of a single individual.

I think it was the beach that did it to me this time. Its endless there, the pulse of the earth heart creating wave after wave after wave, until the end of time. There is no time. There are no other places. Eternity is quiet and moves like a mirage through the palm fronds and sea foam. An oceanic haze subdues all thought and action. All of life narrows into that rhythmic repetition of crashing water, pause, and swooshing retreat, which stirs up old memories like slow cloudy dreams.

“I guess nothing really matters,” I said out loud.

My friend paused, nodded a bit and said, “It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, but you need to choose a fight, and fight for it.”

We threw more clumps of stardust at the rock. I nodded superficially and the feeling remained there, anchored in my stomach like a long avoided truth. When the waves washed away our stardust, we threw more, watching it twinkle in the sunshine. We called it modern art and gave it purpose. Then the waves came, and the spirals disappeared.

“It doesn’t really matter what you do,” I said again. “You can drink ayahuasca with some shaman in the jungle, or play soccer and drink beer. You can give away all your possessions and go fast in the desert, or study for years from books and write research papers that maybe some grad student will read some day. You can travel the world or stay home. It’s all the same. Everything just keeps happening. Life just keeps happening. The only difference is in your mind, in how you convince yourself into believing something is different.”

The tide pulled out, creating big watery pockets in the sand beneath our heels.

“I think that is freedom,” my friend said. “That is liberation. If nothing really matters, you can just do whatever you want to do.”

“But what’s the point?”

A wave came up and under our butts where we sat, washing away all the sparkles from our feet, tickling the undersides of our legs. The sun was closer to the horizon now and the ocean was slowly turning pink and orange. I buried my toes beneath the stardust and sighed.

#travel writing #playa negra #monpiche #ecuador