The Sea

"The edge of the sea has many voices, as I think of them, some booming, some frantic, some crashing. But the voice I respond most deeply to, listen most closely to, is one that whispers: a sussuration of water riffling across clacking stone, mingled with breezes catching in the high grass of the dunes. After years of first finding and then finally hearing and understanding what that voice can teach me, I have just begun to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of my life, of all our lives. Not young, not old; not betrothed, not alone; thinking back, looking forward; not broken, not quite whole anymore either. But present."

Dominique Browning, Slow Love

The Sea

Bolinas, December 2008

On a visit to the library last week with Lily, I picked up Graham Swift's account of his writer life, Making an Elephant, and hardly put it down until I read the last page. Waterland and Last Orders have long been on my list of books to read, but I haven't come anywhere near reading them. I just haven't the urge to read novels lately. But essays pull me in, and Making an Elephant is a collection of essays on subjects as diverse as the genius of Montaigne to the love of the seaside. In the chapter "I do Like to Be Beside the Sea," originally a lecture delivered to a group of French academics in Nice, Swift wrote, "Whatever else the sea is, it's not us, it's the beyond. It makes us feel, and even be reconciled to, our insignificance. It's the great place which is no place, where no one lives. The sea is destiny, eternity, oblivion, death." Last Christmas, our family convened in a house by the sea in Bolinas, where we sat late into the the early morning hours around a big table, nursing our grief for our deceased father. His departure in the spring had cast us all adrift, and in those brief days by the sea, we laughed and cried in equal measure. By gathering ourselves in that tiny town on the coast, we peeled back the years to our childhood by the Pacific, when we grew up deliriously happy together under the watchful eyes of our father. Now his absence hovered around us, binding us once again even as distance and time separate us inexorably. I am reminded of this very special time, a tiny capsule in the sea where I've cast my life, a while ago when my brother Dai sent us, all his brothers and sisters, an email at 3:30 AM Pacific time, telling us he couldn't sleep and missed us all very much. "I miss you all..." I read those words, hurtled across a whole continent, in the pale morning light and was shattered.

The Sea II

"All the most interesting things in the world take place where the sea meets the land and you're between those two states of mind. On that border zone, you're neither one nor the other, you're both."

J.G. Ballard

I love the sea. I was born by the sea, and it is inextricably part of my being. As Ken Worpole wrote in an essay on tidal pools, "it is often at the border between land and sea - often when we are children - that we first have intimations of our own insignificance, as well as a countervailing sense of an irreducible self." My mind keeps returning to the image of  the connecting line between land and sea, like the connecting tissue between past and present, ever shifting, one not distinct from the other, just like the last  line in T. S.Eliot's poem East Coker, "In my end is my beginning." I am forever poised on that line, being between two states of mind, becoming a new self but never fully shedding the former one.

The Sea

I was born in a small town by the Pacific Ocean, where I spent much of my early childhood. I remember long days at the beach, swimming in the water and playing on the sand under a vast blue sky and a brilliant sun. This is the landscape that defines me. Part of what I love about the summer is the chance to recapture this lost eden, the chance to immerse myself in the sea, to feel its regenerative force, even just for a tiny moment. We had a perfect day at the beach this Saturday. It was the first time we had gone back to Bellport since we sold the house two years ago. Lily was deliriously happy, diving gleefully into the water every chance she had. Watching her, I saw myself decades ago, in another continent, in a different ocean, but with the same happiness and joy filling up our lungs.