You planted in me a love for the ocean, but a life so far from its shores. Maybe the love originates from a thread deeper than you, one that reaches back to our ancestors whose home on the islands was all they knew.
How did we get so far away from them? Or them from us?
It wasn’t planned. I think it started with another love, love for a person whose life was firmly planted among fields of corn, someone who knew little of the power of crashing waves. Even I would do the same for love, it seems, falling for a person whose home is among lush green forests and deep red earth – instead of deep blue water.
Yet all that love never quelled the yearning for the sea in me.
The yearning for a life where the sound and rhythm of waves is not a machine to lull me to sleep, but creation, real creation bringing me to life. I see the shifting lines of vibrant color in the sky each time the sun rises and sets over the water. I feel my feet settling into the hot sand and finding relief with the rising tide. I breathe in the salty air with a recognition deeper than I understand.
Sometimes I imagine an old woman with wrinkles and brittle bones sitting at the edge of the shore with shells lined up in front of her, a shell for each worry and each hope. The sea is home, she is home, so her worries and hopes pass like waves out and out until they become a part of a larger story.
Is she the future or the past? Is she me or my ancestors?
Either way, we are where we are meant to be.
Written on the shores of Carmel-by-the-Sea, October 2023