ocean

I scribbled this down in my notebook when recently on holidays:


The ocean is in my blood and in my bones. Though I’m not a sailor, a surfer, nor a fisherman, I feel a connection to it with its salty redolence, its sounds. It wasn’t until I spent time living away from the coast that it dawned on me just how imprinted was its influence on me. It is a thread sewn through from some of my earliest memories, a constant I always took for granted. When I returned to the West Coast to visit for the first time after having moved away, I remember the smell of the salt in the air, something that had been forcibly removed from my memory through living in a landlocked area of the country, where the air is stale and empty. That scent hit me full force, waves of feelings and recollections that startled me in their number and intensity.

As I spend a weekend at a condo on the beach with my family and friends, I have been pausing to reflect on how much the ocean has shaped my life and I’d even go so far as to say, my faith. Being by the ocean is when I am most relaxed, where I am most in awe of creation and aware of God’s goodness. I feel Him tugging at me, telling me to come and rest from those things that constantly trouble me. As I write at the kitchen table overlooking the swath of beach, the wind blows, suspending the sea birds as they cry over the rolling whitecaps. I love the gray tinged with hints of navy and aquamarine blue; the water hides so many secrets. What I love most about sea is its constancy, the seemingly eternal nature of it; I find it comforting that it will be doing what it has always done long after I have returned to dust.