"You may be surprised at what seclusion with God will do for your mind, body, and soul…. Through the portals of silence the healing sun of wisdom and peace will shine upon you."
— Paramahansa Yogananda
A crowed street fair, contest horns, and sound systems wouldn't be super compatible. I'm guessing the SRF is thinking that one contest (and a token minor second contest) could be swallowed in the effort to avoid conflict with the contest promoters.
Once the contests free zone tradition is broken, there will be much less opposition to contests. Even if the current council gives the WWLB a monopoly on contests at Swamis, a future city council may be much more willing to allow 3, 4, 5 contests a year. The tradition will have already been broken. The press will be bored with the issue and the community disillusioned.
Swamis Ceremonies
Swamis is so special to so many residents that they hold significant ceremonies at Swamis.
Swamis provides a natural confluence in terms of aesthetics and structure for the social, spiritual, and physical activities of many Encinitas residents. Swamis, the place and its people, are meaningful to many....our struggle with defining why a competition at the Swamis Beach Park is wrong is because our reasoning is unquantifiable. Our reasoning is based in the aesthetic of the community.
Our reasoning is more art than science.
...
Encinitas as a surf hamlet has distinguished itself from Santa Cruz, Huntington Beach and Malibu, it is a surf community true to its own values as a surf community.
In Encinitas, at Swamis, at the Crown Jewel of Encinitas, surfing is about a lot of things, both good and bad, but the one thing that surfing is NOT about at Swamis is horns and jerseys and scaffolding and winners and losers. The powers that be in Encinitas don't allow for that stuff at Swamis. We think this to be... pretty cool.
Contests are NOT what surfing is about. Winning a trophy is not a core value of surfing.
Take a look at the Swamis Beach Park today. Residents and citizens from ALL walks of life: the young mother with her baby stroller, the guitar dude strumming melodically, the joggers, the watercolor artists, the coffee drinkers, the boot camp Marines, the newspaper readers, the bike riders, the dog walkers, the exercise folks, the daily swimmers, the divers, the Yoga classes, the young families, the lady hawking egg rolls, the balancing wire folks, the exercise classes, the fisherman, sadly a few homeless folks -- and yes the surfers, all of them and many, many more enjoyed the peace and serenity that the Swamis park and the Swamis beach below offered.
There is a move in other cities to "create great places". They have a desire (or at least marketing) to get their residents out into the same space, socializing with each other, and participating in activities together. Much of their efforts are very artificial and destined to not live up to the sales pitch. No worries?
The North County Times covered the Swamis crowd too.
Swamis services hundreds of surfers a day when there is swell. This picture is of a moderate crowd for swamis. Half the crowd probably never surfed Swamis before. In surf folklore, or in other places in California, many of those "randoms" would be vibed off the peak because they are super dangerous to themselves and others in a big crowd. At Swamis they are just part of the herd.Since there was a shark attack in the news, I asked a few surfers [at Cardiff] if they worried about that. They laughed and said no. One said, "It's more dangerous being around certain surfers that don't know what they're doing. If you get hit in the head by a board, it isn't pretty."Swamis is way more dangerous than Cardiff because the crowd is thicker and contains more people who are underskilled.
A major issue at the last council meeting was that the school was not represented (PEC office staff say that the district policy is for the school to not get involved in "political" issues), so the PEC PTA is the only possibility for school representation.Is "political" now synonymous with controversial? PEC staff could have been informative without taking a position on the ordinance.
That was a great kick off winter storm. It rained for like 10 hours straight and then we experienced one of the craziest wind storms ever all night. Lots of trees came down all over town, the power went out in downtown Leucadia for a few hours and the wind caused all kinds of havoc.
Even before there were many ways to make a serious career out of surfing, there were mainstream movies like Big Wednesday, which tried to capture the surf subculture. The movie is accepted because it tried to capture the surfing ethos. The main characters' challenge is not to triumph in some contest. The main characters negotiate with responsibilities associated with growing up. They also develop camaraderie common among surfers and in the end they jointly triumph in their challenge to successfully push their own personal limits.
My generation's mainstream surf movie was North Shore. Basically, the the theme of the movie is contests are stupid and unnecessary for someone to enjoy the sport. The old wise character in the story boycotts contests and the mean pro surfer character demonstrates how contests can feed attitudes that are counter to the surf ethos.
In some ways its like rock music, where some musicians sell out to the corporate media giants. Some people see the city council as getting ready to sell out and/or being clueless to the fact that Encinitas had been recognized as a genuine surf town in soul and action.
This project is along the I15 Corridor
The developers have rights to build 345 houses. They do not own the development rights to build 2,700 houses. That many homes sure would help to turn a profit, so if I were them I would try to push for 2,700 houses too.
This is the developer's rendering of the project. Like most Leucadians, I'd rather live in that neighborhood than on the 16th floor of a high-rise. I think we can agree that this is not the painting of Merriam Mountain that the kool-aid peddlers were handing out a few years ago.
