Waveless

Paramahansa Yogananda moved to California in 1925 and established the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. He drew followers of every type: big names of the day, like Luther Burbank and George Eastman, as well as ordinary folk who looked for beliefs that could unite all religions, east and west.


I only know of him because of the meditation center on the bluff in Encinitas, a floating blue and white cake above the beach everyone calls Swami’s. I sometimes think of people inside the compound, sitting on benches or the dichondra, eyes closed, breathing in jasmine and fuchsia. I wonder sometimes if I turned away from that bluff and paddled my board west: How long until every smell but salt disappears? When will my aimlessness finally lift me up, into the waveless air?

———

Swami’s Beach

In walled gardens behind the palisade,
walkways curve through fern and rhododenra,
one made space to the next, a man sitting
on a bench with his eyes closed, a woman
at the next turn staring straight through the earth
to the dark instant back where time began.
After a rain, snails dry out on the path.
Always the gulls overhead, dipping past
sight and sound. Fifty years earlier,
Yogananda himself touched this azalea.

Outside the compound, two surfers walk tenderly
down steep cliffs toward the beach, their boards brushing
manzanita along the trail. One daydreams
his way under Swami’s blue dome, floating
in space above the floor. One daydreams blue
in every direction, a wave that won’t
dissolve at shore, a wave to eliminate
time. They reach water with hours to spare. No
cars honking, no boss calling, they slide down a wall
of world gone moments later. All morning

they paddle back to deeper water, regret
meeting desire, desire meeting regret.
In between, that fast falling like love,
that flower we smelled once
in a town we no longer can name.