I used to believe that water was the ancient book from which I read my lessons. It stretched its fingers to me. A handshake. It held me in the palm of power and pain. I bent down, kneeled, and listened. I heard history.

I used to believe that water was the language that bridged the gap of continents. That all stories and gods were born from the water—the myths and the creators.

I used to believe the poets. The ones who said the natural world was a text and the ocean could be read. That there was a message in the syllables that rolled over each other like waves.

But I don’t believe that any more.

A month after I graduated from college I found myself caught somewhere between a rip tide moving out and the tide coming in. Caught where the waves break. And I went under.

Everyone goes under in a different way. Everyone who comes back up and finds breath again learns something about who they are and how nice sand feels stuck to a wet body. Tiny particles of terra firma.

Everybody holds onto something.

I let go.

Steph and I arrived in Costa Rica feeling slightly humbled by a foreign country but righteously justified with our backpacks and the pleasant feeling of possibility. We could do anything we wanted, with two months to kill before I had to start a job in Washington D.C. and Steph left for a fellowship in the Middle East.

We could sit on the beach all day and watch the un-mixing of Caribbean culture, Jamaican and Spanish, like oil on water. Or hitchhike to another coast and climb volcanoes and camp in the mud and ride the dusty buses all day long.

And we did that for a few weeks. And then we got to Samara on the Pacific coast, and the rains came. The bugs drove us from our hot, cramped room to the beach where we walked in the rain, up and back, up and back, like meditative boot camp.

We kept walking, talking between the silences about a Thich Nhat Hanh book we had taken with us, and the concepts of mindfulness, emptiness, and nonattachment.. My parents had raised me on similar philosophies that jelled into a word when I got to college: Buddhism. I had spent the previous four years studying the religion and as I walked on that beach, I vowed to find a sangha, a community to practice with, when I got to D.C.

Perhaps it was the sound of rain falling onto already wet sand or the Pacifico ringing in our ears, but Steph and I had settled into an unintentional three-day spiritual retreat. We learned to walk all over again, to place each foot with purpose. We learned to breathe all over again, concentrating on each inhalation and exhalation as we made vows to live in the moment, hold our fear up to the light, and take in each new day as a fresh breath.