The Sun, the Sand, the Sea

Lessons from the beach on a not-so-vacationy vacation.

I lay down on my belly, the tufts from the teal and blue beach towel making imprints on my thighs. I put my head on my hands, right over left, temple on top, slightly tilted towards the ocean.

Out of the little triangle I created, I can just see the waves, watch as they crest, that moment of suspension before gravity brings them crashing back down. I wait for their impact. The ocean breeze filters through my arms to cool my face. I hear my little girl singing happily to herself as she makes a seaside bake shop out of a bundt cake sand mold.

It’s a moment of quiet, a cocoon I’ve created to slow down for a sec. I’ve been solo parenting with my daughter for days, and the constant litany of her voice, while lovely, has become grating. It never stops, and I need this moment filled only with the sounds of the sea to self-regulate. To come back to why I brought her down here in the first place. Why I brought myself here.

As I breathe in and out, deepening the inhales, and allowing the exhales to become full but easy, my mind wanders. My legs fall another half an inch outward. I was unaware that I had been clenching them in place. I do so much of that, that involuntary clenching, holding myself, my schedule, my responsibilities, my emotions, always humming with the energy of what’s next, not what is. Lying prone on the beach, I breathe out the future, and inhale the past.

I feel each one of my former selves flow through me. All of the me’s that have set foot on this particular beach or one like it mere miles away. The decades of showing up on a North Carolina shore looking for something…

It’s the same breeze, the same smell, the same seagulls, the same sand, the same sea. The me’s have changed, but the ocean hasn’t. Steady and steadfast.

The ocean is where I come when I am seeking, unmoored by the waves of life. It’s where I look for peace and patience. I’ve never asked it for answers, just a reprieve from the asking, content to just be here…there.

The memories of the me’s slide in and out of my mind like the sound of the sea.

Me as a child on every beach from Emerald Isle to Bald Head Island - wave jumping, sand castle building, shell collecting. Sunburnt and sticky riding in the back of a non-air conditioned van. Lunches pulled from the white cooler with a green top and an old 1970’s comforter as our beach blanket. No chairs. No boogie boards. We were borderline poor, and the ocean was free. It didn’t feel like a cheap vacation back then. Just the best use of a summer day.

Me as a teenager, finding solace in the vastness of the ocean and the constancy of the waves, the anger of the sounds matching my angsty insides. Sweatshirts pulled over top of shorts for sunset walks on the beach, melodramas playing out in my head as I sang to the sea. I smile slightly at how deeply I felt back then and how much the ocean can absorb.

Me as a young adult, drunk off margaritas, reading Nicholas Sparks and wondering if I would ever have my own family to bring to this beach. At the time, I would have given anything to be interrupted by a child anxious for my attention. Now, I would give anything to make it through one chapter without a little voice breaking my concentration.

Me love struck by the affections of a military man, dancing at a music festival, making love in the middle of a hurricane. Leaving my Mom with my dogs on Mother’s Day weekend for a boy. I thought she would understand; she didn’t. For years after, it rained every time the boy and I went to this beach. We weathered more than one hurricane holed up in an AirBnB, laughing at our luck.

Me now. My own daughter crafting Seaside Shell Bakery with shells I carefully collected for her, content to work with her little yellow shovel, and some plastic sand toys. Doing cartwheels to the water and back, squealing when the seaweed grazes her ankles and running away as the waves chase her.

Did I know I would get here? Did the ocean know? Can a body of water be sentient? Can it feel your pain? Can it hold joy you are not yet ready to accept? Does it understand challenge, complexity and complication?

This beach doesn’t feel like home, but it does feel familiar. Like most places in North Carolina, I sense a visceral attachment to this shore, like my body would know how to find it even if my brain couldn’t. But unlike any of those other places where nostalgia kicks in, here it is a sense of deja vu, a spine tingling awareness that I have been here before. At least, some version of me. The sea dunes hold the whispers of the old me’s, a graveyard of past selves who have found their resting place here.

That could feel daunting, or haunting. Instead, I experience an overwhelming sense of comfort. Like this ocean is big enough to hold all of the me’s, the full version of each, not one whose joy or pain or success or anger or volume or size or existence were tempered. This beach has had the full experience of me, its landscape unaffected by my muchness.

In my life, at least, there is no other person or place or thing about which I can say that. Even those whose presence in my life started before my birth have not fully known each part of me. I forbid it. At times, I was the person I thought they wanted me to be. At other times, I was intentionally the thing they hated. My clenching has kept me in compliance. My defiance has kept me from self-destructing.

It wasn’t joy that overtook me on my towel in that moment. It was knowing.

The ocean has seen all of my exploits, intuits all of my emotions, has broken me down to my elements. It holds my history in its depths and ushers my future on to its shores. I’ve never left the beach feeling anything but peace…and space. The clenching cleared out by the salt and the sea and the surf. Making space for the next me to rise up.

I didn’t realize how much I need that knowing, how affirming it has been to past me’s and how hopeful it feels to this me.

It wasn’t much of a vacation. Is anything when there’s a “six and three-quarter” year old along for the ride? I did finish a book, although I was interrupted approximately 638 times in the final thirty pages. I got sunburned because global warming is a thing and the 30spf that worked on these beaches in my childhood just doesn’t cut it these days. I took pictures of my child being buried in the sand only to emerge just seconds after the mermaid tail was complete because “The sun’s in my eyes!” I didn’t get in a walk at sunset but I wished I’d had a sweatshirt. I watched my husband jump waves with my daughter and thought about all of the days of sitting on beaches before, wishing in to existence this exact life.

But one thing I took away from the ocean this time is an understanding that it is sentient, in that it cannot see the future, nor does it bother trying. But it can hold your past, all of your past, and it will wash away space for you to have a future. And when you come back to visit its shores, it will welcome you, all of the yous it knows.

And look forward to knowing the next you too.