Starting to slow down

Doing yoga with a sea lion who is also doing yoga is a new experience. In Prisoner’s Harbor in Channel Islands National Park, off the Santa Barbara coast, I rigged up a sun shade on our foredeck, rolled out my mat for the first time in months, and watched a small sea lion about 100 yards from our boat stick their flippers up in the air to sun them out (for about 45 minutes I might add — inspirational!). As I stretched and sighed with contentment on the boat, I realized that both the sea lion and I were moving our bodies in ways that felt good to us at the time we wanted to do them. The lessons of slowing down and tuning in have come from all kinds of creatures and living things.

We stayed for four nights in Prisoner’s Harbor on Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park. Our boat provided shade and respite for thousands upon thousands of California anchovy fish. We would watch them for minutes on end, mesmerized by their constant motion punctuated by moments of rest. Juvenile pelicans would try to land and grab some anchovy nearby, but we never saw them swallow the fish — maybe the anchovies are too fast for the young, inexperienced birds?!

The Channel Islands have at least 12 species of plants and animals seen nowhere else, and above are three of them in photos — island fox, Channel Islands silver lotus, and island scrub jay. We saw bat rays and swell sharks in the shallows as we paddleboarded to shore for hikes. We wandered along the riverbed to see what birds we could see, including a common yellowthroat, Anna’s hummingbirds galore, swallows skimming the surface of the stream water to catch insects, and a juvenile bald eagle that Conor rightly identified as an eagle, whereas I said “that has to be a hawk” and then an actual hawk showed up next to the eagle about 3x smaller than the eagle and I ate my crow (in a vegan way, of course).

We paddled over large purple starfish and orange starfish with patterns clothing designers try to imitate. We saw seals napping along the rocks, sea lions frolicking in packs, grebes with their long bird necks curled up along their body to sleep while floating on the water, spotted towhees scratching in the leaves underneath live oak, orange crowned warblers singing their tunes along the hills — all of these reminders of the soul of our planet in the diversity of beings.

The space in this new style of living to notice all the creatures, including oneself and the spectrum of emotions we feel all day every day, is both incredible and can also be overwhelming. There are no Teams meetings or never-ending email responses to draft to distract oneself from the work of living and sailing and taking care. It’s an adjustment for us both individually and together, and over and over, the lesson so far from the universe is: keep slowing down. Sometimes we’re able to slow down, other times we aren’t — we’ll keep practicing.