lately i’ve been listening to a lot of tristan prettyman. like, it’s kind of becoming a problem (sorry fellow spotify users, don’t adjust your computer screens, i am indeed listening to the entire cedar & gold album again). but my oh my (see what i did there? if you don’t know her music, then this pun isn’t really much of anything, but if you do then, look at me being all clever and such!) do her lyrics speak directly to my soul -in fact, most times it’s as if she has climbed into my brain and put to paper what months of self-reflection have produced. (and between the random celebrity gossip and logged SAT vocab words, it’s a wonder she made it out of there alive). while her voice and song-beats alone would have me hitting repeat, it’s her ability to quantify shared sentiments that has me hooked.
on saturday, with the san diego sunshine finally having returned to us (this is what we pay for in sky-high rents and mortgage prices, weather gods), i took a stroll along a piece of beach-side real estate that has long since become my (one of many) happy place. the swami’s boardwalk is where magic tends to happen. or at least that’s what i tell myself as i admire the better-than-average-looking wet suit-clad gents that give me a head nod as they scamper down the hill to the shore, surfboard in hand. because, hi, that’s pretty magical.
but seriously, surfer-oggling aside, i’ve always seemed to find solace along this portion of pch. maybe it’s the fact that its one of the only places where i allow the voices in my head to be quieted, when i ask time to slow down and it actually does, or where the familiarity of the landscape of my youth offers an unprecedented comfort that i snuggle up into like my favorite living room chair.
whatever the reason, on this particular saturday, as i logged that almost two-mile route, i marinated on one particular verse in tp’s track “never say never” (i know, it must be a good song if she shares the title with a justin bieber jam):
…Gotta be careful what you give
You never know just what you get
Who knows, maybe the best hasn’t happened yet
Some days I still feel the same
And my love, it still remains
Wish I could start a fire in the pouring rain (via)
and as my ponytail swooshed behind me (a la marsha brady) and my silver sparkle toms carried me forward down the trail, a smile crept across my face as i let the words sink deep down into my soul.
maybe.
maybe this is just the beginning.
maybe this past year was for growing, and this one, for thriving.
maybe this is my time. my moment. my season.
maybe big things wait for me around the bend.
because who knows, maybe the best hasn’t happened yet.
swamis encinitas | january 2013.
