I go never knowing what to expect, only that there’s a purpose for the pause, and that time by the ocean will always be richly rewarded. In Northern California, summers are often cool and grey due to the marine layer. But in September the sun is a gift, and the beaches are deserted. Prime time for dozing and gazing.
The breeze brings a salty, fishy scent difficult to describe and unmatched anywhere. The waves surge, foam, plume, thunder, spray, cavort, buckle, twist, crash, froth in never-ending motion and vitality. Mary Oliver describes them in her poem “Winter”: “And the waves/gush pearls/from their snowy throats.” No uber-expensive, ultra-contoured mattress could match the comfort of warm sand on the back. Lying within the thrumming music of the waves, a nap is irresistible.
Perhaps the serenity here comes from knowing we’re all small waves in a big ocean; our moods and worries will peak and fall, peak and fall as easily, rhythmically. And all we’re seeing is the surface: what treasures the depths hold! Mary Oliver says in the same poem: “and the sea still streaming in like a mother wild with gifts–/in this world I am as rich/as I need to be.”
The shimmering play of light on water must be one of the most beautiful sights on our planet. A silvery, brocade carpet stretches gleaming to the horizon—maybe to Fiji or the Whitsunday Islands? Invitation to a mystery so lovely it aches…
In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson explained our fascination with the sea: an adult human body is about 60% water; ocean beats in our veins. Mark Nepo adds, “the ribbon of God’s sea passes through my gills.” Swimming, a fish takes in water and its gill turns the water into the air it needs to live. As we swim through our days, Nepo says, we must turn “our experience into something that sustains us…pain into wonder, heartache into joy.” (The Book of Awakening, pp. 302-303)
Beauty, power and vastness: aren’t these all attributes of the Creator? Words are small things to hold such magnificence; perhaps the only authentic stance is a contemplative silence. Once people deified “the circuit of the stars or the mighty water,” “out of joy in their beauty.” But the author of Wisdom 13:1-5 says, “let them realize from these things how much more powerful is the one who made them. For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen.”
