Learning to Love the Ocean

and finding comfort in existentialism

Hi from Delaware! I’m on vacation with my family this week. To be honest, I’ve never liked the beach. My hair looks awful when it’s wet. I am always prone to sunburn. Sand gets everywhere. It wasn’t until recently that I started to view the ocean — being by it, swimming in it, viewing it from afar — as sacred. A method of prayer.

On Thursday evening I swam in the ocean. There was nothing special about it, but I felt like I was a new body experiencing this for the first time. I looked out at the sun dancing on the big blue sea and then I looked up and saw the big blue sky. I saw a tiny airplane cross my field of vision. Nobody else was in the water, but a tiny seagull floated across the waves. These tiny things in this big world. Something has shifted, maybe in the two years I spent away from the shore, but I am no longer as irritated when water gets up my nose or when shells scratch my skin. I’m just grateful to be alive, swimming in this big blue sea, sharing it with so much life.

“We Are In Front of the Sea 7” by Lee Seul A

When I was 17, I took a leap to go on an isolated rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho. To say the least, I was not an outdoorsy person. I went because my favorite English teacher was running it. I cried the night before I left in regret and fear. But it turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences of my whole life, and in spite of my terrible memory, I have journal entries and four rolls of film to remember it by. One night, my teacher said something that stuck with me: we spend so much time in boxes: we sleep in a box in a bigger box, and then wake up and take a motored box to get to another box, and so on. It’s easy to feel disconnected. But I’ve found that spending time with nature brings an innate feeling of belonging — as if your body remembers where it came from. I wrote on my last day: “I feel so grounded with the earth. The birds are singing even as the sun sets and I am so calm and happy and free. I feel like I can do anything.” Over the years I have grown farther and farther from that feeling, but I have a taste of it again, and I don’t want to let it go this time.

17-year-old me on the Salmon River

I wrote in another journal entry: “I stretch my arms to the sky and cry ‘I’m here!’ and the response is only a small crash of the waves. I am here. I am insignificant.” I think my current self found a way into that moment.

I reflect on this poem by Anne Spencer:

Earth, I thank you 
For the pleasure of your language 
You've had a hard time
bringing it to me 
from the ground 
to grunt thru the noun 
To all the way 
feeling seeing smelling touching 
-- awareness
I am here! 

I’ve always spent too much time in my own head to ponder existentialism. Everything in my life has always seemed so big. I overthink conversations I have with cashiers, or how I say “thank you” to the bus driver. I lost a big chance at an internship back in May that I really wanted, and I sobbed so hard that my eyes were puffy for days. My parents told me, “It’s not the end of the world.” But it felt like it, at the time. I don’t picture life after the big things or the little things because I don’t want to be disappointed. I don’t think about the unknown because I’m afraid of it.

I didn’t get an internship this summer. The unknown met me face-to-face. Instead, in an attempt at acceptance, I read a lot of poetry. I read about people who noticed the world, in different geographical and historical places, in all its leaves and droplets and grains of sand, in the living things that grace it. I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but I’ll create my own as I go along. Though I don’t know what the future holds for me, this world is full of so much. The least I can do is listen to it, in the meantime. Let the waves crash and the leaves rustle and the cicadas sing. I just want to catch up on what I’ve missed, in all my time not noticing. That makes me excited about whatever lies ahead. Even if it’s just endless blue from here, I’ll ride every wave.

As Louise Glück said in “Otis”:

This is the end, isn’t it?
And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea
no longer torments me; the self
I wished to be is the self I am.

Further Reading

“In Summer We’re Reborn” by Nina MacLaughlin in The Paris Review

"The Summer You Learned to Swim" by Michael Simms

“Swimming, One Day In August” by Mary Oliver

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

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What I Enjoyed This Week

Recent Reads

• Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. This is a highly imaginative and reflective collection of essays. There are some I thoroughly enjoyed (“Kinship”, “Dog Paw”, “Trench-Times/Dream Dog”) but others lost me. They are quite abstractly self-centered — not often in a bad way, but rather an inaccessible way — as it seemed to be written more for herself as a healing exercise than for others. I did appreciate it, and there are many instances of beauty that I will return to and carry with me for a long time. Such as: “You will have to be comfortable with the truth that there is a stone in the dark, a grave for hope. But if you can get a better view of what is going on, you can see that the problematic pit is really just a small hole along the path that is otherwise lined with the other living things that shot up toward the light” (from “The Pits”). 3/5

Other Wonderful Things

• My Youswim swimsuit! I have the Alpolmb High Waist Two Piece in Fern. I think a good chunk of my resentment towards the beach as of recent years came from feeling insecure in my body. I am nowhere near the ideal “perfect body” I dreamt of on the beach as an 11-year-old, but I feel so good and happy in a swimsuit that loves me. It’s one size fits all (like actually, it stretches to fit anyone from size 2 to 14, with more sizes coming) and they do an amazing job of featuring people of all body types on their campaigns. I’ll probably wear suits from this brand forever.

• Japanese Breakfast’s album Psychopomp. In Crying in H-Mart, Michelle Zauner talked about putting together this album as a way to cope after her mother’s passing. After reading the memoir last week, I’ve been listening to it non-stop. Sonically, it’s a blend of dream pop and garage rock. Lyrically, it’s poignantly personal and heart-wrenching. My favorite track is “Heft”.

• I had a lovely iced oat lavender matcha latte from Drifting Grounds in Bethany Beach, DE. There’s a used bookstore next door too, and after visiting both I got back in the car and felt like I was floating. A glowing orb of contentedness. It really doesn’t take much, huh.

Thank you for reading. And thank you to my family for a wonderful trip this week. Hi! Love you!

Hope you have a fulfilling week. Take a little walk in nature if you can. Or just look up at the sky for a minute or two.

<3

Tara