I find something delightful about the edit bay, a scoop in the sphere of being, where what has happened can be moulded and spat out as something else.

I learnt to edit years ago in Costa Rica. During a particularly ferocious thunderstorm a friend Tim and I had made in the village called Ronaldo lost his truck down the side of a steep cliff in the mountains nearby. 

Fortuitously for Ronaldo, Tim and our traveling companion and dear friend Shano are Grips and leapt to his aid, rigging ropes and orchestrating the rescue of the truck with broken Spanish and lots of heart. At one point Shano was heard shouting “la ropa, la ropa” which translates as “clothes, clothes!”

This left me to hunker down for six hours, and teach myself the foundations of editing, with a mac laptop and a few pointers from Tim the night before. 

The drifting lilt of the day passes through, unperturbed by how time seams to move along outside of the screen, I am totally immersed in an alternative reality, one that is past and at the click of the button will fast forward to the future. 

It initiated editing my passions surfing, skating, and BMX with Team Neighbor, to social documentary shorts with non-profits. 

Tim’s parting words of wisdom for Ronaldo and what turned into our mantra for the rest of the trip,

“No mas arriba Ronaldo!”

“No more up Ronaldo!”

Sometimes when the surf is flat it is helpful (to myself) to paint a surfboard, visualising the end result - which is riding it again. The obsession is real. Too many non surf days in a row and I start howling at the moon. There is a balance to be found and maintained between the all consuming yearning of being immersed in the ocean, a place of beautiful neutrality and the pull of the essential need to be on land to exist in human form. 

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The scope of the bind of obsession soars the heart upward, cushions other aspects and angles of being. Unraveling the extent to which I have relinquished the current state of my mental health over to the ocean is freedom for my soul. 

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The ocean gives me room to breath on land. 

To float in a fortress of water.

To be engulfed in a sea of fortitude.

To look to the horizon for my next move. 

To sit and wait for a sign. 

To hear the air. 

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