California rushes to prepare for massive ‘Kelvin’ wave and predicted sea level rise as reflected on by Sensei Michael Jinpa
From Clear Mind Zen Sanctuary’s wooden deck, the Pacific Ocean does not look like an adversary. It always appears as an endless expanse of gray and silver. The ocean breathes against Harborview Point’s granite pilings. Yet this week, the harbor master and our neighbors along the low wharf stack burlap sandbags. They reinforce sea gates and check fishing smows’ mooring lines. Word travels quickly along the shoreline. A massive underwater swell, a **Kelvin wave preparation** challenge, slides northward beneath the surface. This wave carries thermal expansion and displaced tides. It threatens to lift our waters another foot above an already rising tide line.
Zen practice frequently returns to water. We use it as an image of the mind: fluid, receptive, refusing to be grasped. Water takes the exact shape of whatever container holds it. However, water also serves as the ancient teacher of impermanence, or anicca. It does not negotiate with our property lines or municipal boundaries. Water ignores our fondest architectural hopes. Warm oceanic energy shifts across thousands of miles of deep sea. Our local coast simply bears witness. The ocean’s physical reality reminds us. Nothing in this world is solid or permanently secured. We bolt our footings into the shore, but permanence eludes us.
Meeting the Rising Tide with Awareness
During my years as a hospice chaplain, I often sat beside individuals and families. The inevitable tide of physical decline approached. Human instinct almost always begins with frantic resistance. People attempt to build walls against the body’s truth. They push back the encroaching reality with sheer force of will. However, true peace never arrived through denial or frantic fortifying. It arrived only when we learned to look directly at the approaching reality. We met vulnerability with quiet, steady attention. What is true at the bedside is equally true at our community’s high-water line. This applies directly to our **Kelvin wave preparation** efforts.
Our natural impulse in the face of sudden climate upheaval is panic or numbness. We see coastal defenses overwhelmed. We feel the chill of existential anxiety. We wonder how long this harbor or this sanctuary can remain dry. In the contemplative tradition, we understand that anxiety often represents the mind’s desperate attempt to avoid feeling grief. We are grieving the predictable world we thought we inherited. To pretend that a foot of rising water is merely a technical inconvenience, solvable with more sandbags, is a form of spiritual sleepwalking. We have altered the planetary metabolism. The ocean reflects our own actions back to us with unblinking clarity.
Compassion in Action, Fearless Hearts
Mindful presence does not mean passive surrender. In the harbor, our sangha members shovel sand alongside painters, dockworkers, and elderly shopkeepers. We discover what radical compassion looks like. We translate it into physical labor. Each shovel lifted into a canvas sack is an act of care. We care for the person whose gallery or home sits six inches lower than our own. Zen teaches that non-attachment is not cold indifference to the world. Rather, it is the absence of grasping. We protect the town with diligence precisely because we know it is fragile and precious. Our **Kelvin wave preparation** embodies this.
An ethical clarity emerges when the water comes to our doorsteps. The ocean makes no moral judgments; it simply obeys thermodynamic laws. The moral weight belongs entirely to us. How do we respond to the displaced? How do we share resources when lower avenues flood? Will this crisis soften our hearts toward one another? If collective fear drives us inward to hoard dry ground, we drown spiritually. This happens long before the brine touches our floorboards. If instead we let the approaching wave dismantle our illusion of separate selfhood, it becomes a catalyst for profound solidarity.
This evening, before the highest tide arrives with the dark, we will sit together on our meditation cushions in silence. We will listen to the foghorns sounding past the jetty. We will hear the heavy thrum of the surf striking the sea wall. We will breathe in the salt air. We will breathe out the knot of apprehension in our chests. The ocean rises, empires decay, forms dissolve into emptiness. Yet right here, in this fragile coastal town, our duty remains luminous and simple: to stay awake, to help our neighbors tie their boats, and to meet whatever tide washes ashore with an open and fearless heart.
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