Page 124 - THE ENDLESS WAVE | Skateboarding, Death & Spirituality

THE ENDLESS WAVE | PART TWO
turn? Do you pump? You’ll most likely end up losing your speed without pumping if you roll up and down, going from forwards and fakie or ride the ramp with back-to-back kickturns. To keep your skating thriving on this halfpipe, you will need to be present and you will most likely want to set your intentions on reaching the top of the transition to skate the coping.
Once you’ve dropped in on grief, you will have experienced acknowledge- ment and acceptance of the dearly departed. As you roll up forwards and fakie between the transitions of good and bad days and kickturn from ramp to ramp telling yourself to be strong, thinking you’re fine, eventually you’ll need to find ways to continue to live and thrive emotionally without the presence of your dearly departed. In the process of grief, you’ll need to set your inten- tions to thrive by pumping through the transitions and skating the coping.
What is it that keeps you thriving in life once our loved ones have crossed over? Our Dearly Departed don’t want us to be stuck and hung up on their ab- sence. From their vantage point on the Other Side, they are the happiest when they can see us continuing to thrive in life. A part of them still lives on within and through our Hearts and memories.
6. Skating the Coping — Once you’ve dropped in and you start to pump to build up your speed, you’ll reach the coping. You can hit the coping in many ways, maybe say, through stalling on the deck, grinding through the coping, doing an air or an invert. You are free to do whatever way you wish to express while you are up there, riding in your own way. Go up, do your thing and come back down, ready to keep up the flow and hit the next transition. There’ll be times where you might only do one trick or many tricks at the top of the ramp on the coping, but whatever you do up there, I’m sure you can relate to the feeling and the stoke of skating in this kind of way as you go from transition to transition. With these actions, you are required to be present and engaged.
With the process of grief, the coping extends beyond literal “coping methods”. Coping methods can become a form of escape from the real emotions ex- perienced as they encourage the body to become distracted and associate someone or something with handling an unpleasant emotion. Common
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