Sacramento is a rolling grid of suburban sprawl and this is not the California that anyone loves. We call ourselves the West, but who would know we were anywhere near beautiful inside all this landlocked separation?
We breathe in the exhale of a city. That thick cloud that settles in the low elevation of a valley – in the lungs. Do we stay because we remember how close we are to the sea? To the idea of it?
Something in the dirt, what’s left of it after all our concrete covering, remembers what it was like to be consumed by heavy water.
I, at least, know that in some life, the sea and I took our first breath together. I have been returning to it piece by piece, from the moment I first witnessed a receding tide and wondered how long it had pulled back, how far it once had blanketed us – how long ago we all had emerged from the seed of all creation.
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The moment I was free, I flew south.
As far opposite as I could get from the Sacramento valley was the Southern California Coast, where nothing is ever any sort of extreme but even though the weather is stagnant, something is always changing. The sea outside my window is a new colour every day, depending on the wind and the position of the sun or the density of kelp floating in on a tide. The swells rise and fall – brought in on old energy, formed thousands of miles and countless hours away. I watch time arrive at my doorstep. I dip my feet into the cool past and present, letting them sink in while the ebbing water fills in all the cracks.
There is a sandstone cove, a cradle of the earth around me and I am alone with my pink sky. Day is turning into a fiery night; the clouds have never been quite so red. From where I stand at the mouth of the cave, the waves brush my ankles and I could so easily wade out further into the break. I need to be washed by churning water – I need the salt to draw out what is stagnant beneath skin that’s been dusted and dried out.
Sacramento is so far away now but the sky and the sea are alive. In the red and the blue between, they morph. I am up to my chest now and the cold takes away my breath. A fistful of sand swirls around my legs and the next wave rocks me up, setting me beneath the crest of its successor. Everything is cloud and foam, pastel light and water canvas washing overhead.
I let the crest of a breaking wave push me down, limp in the wake of its weight. Tumbling around in this thundering breath of water and air, the sound is a heartbeat. The red sky and the water, a womb. I let it spit me out into the evening again – wash up on the sand, only body – bones and skin and birth. The last of the red fades to indigo and then to night and the sea is here still, unrelenting muscle contracting and cleansing and remaking over and over again.
I do not think I will ever let another year of life go by without this sort of baptism. I understand now what they mean when they say you are born again.
Every time I become unclean, I return to the sea.
When I am heartbroken, I cry salt into salt.
All I know is the swell – this sacred cycle. It all washes out. Everything that begins, begins again.
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I thought I would find God in the ocean. I think in part I did, but I also found myself between the shore and a new city with a new kind of movement. Faster paced, beneath more permanent sunshine.
There, I carried the ocean with me always, damp on my skin.
There, I learnt how a heavy rain changes the sea’s color for days at a time. It runs off all our excess until the water is unsafe for swimming. But then it takes it all out, it dissolves into smaller parts per part, until it is clean again.
I return.
I come back as often as I need it – this washing out, this cleansing of dirt and maybe even of my sin. In our churches on land, they have different words for it but it’s really all chemical, isn’t it?
Proverbs 8
Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
When the tide is low, I paddle through a forest of seagrass. A half mile out to sea, tendrils still wrap around my ankles. I can ride a wave in and watch green streaks float beneath my feet. I see between them all the life beneath.
I learn the temperament of this ocean. It cycles through me, my oldest memory. It reminds me daily that this is where we came from and this is where we will return.
I was formed long ages ago,
at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
When there were no watery depths, I was given birth,
when there were no springs overflowing with water;
Before the mountains were settled in place,
before the hills, I was given birth.
But to return implies first that we must leave, and I am learning that we never do this only once. There is, upon every exile a return and a time of rest and then again, a time to set out in search of new lessons.
So I move North, to a landlocked mountain town and I fall in love with frozen water, water in drenching downpour, water dripping in the quiet stream behind the house. I fall in love with work and for seven years I am in love with a man whose favorite body of water is a lake. He likes the stillness and he doesn’t understand why I love the ocean so I finally leave him, because if he doesn’t know God then how can he really know me?
After seven years of separation, I am a new creation of sorts. So I return to the coast, this time North, where days are fogged-in and dramatic as the ocean should be. Holy and dangerous and restless with the work of a relentless undoing.
I seep into the routine of emerging again, for two beautiful years. I get acquainted with the sea again. With God. Prayer returns to me as a daily tether. I breathe deep again, but I know the damp cannot live forever in my lungs.
At the end of my two years and quite by accident, I meet a man who loves the ocean almost as much as I do. We stretch out our time together, legs touching on hardwood pews in our small-town church. After lunch, we put the boat in the water and toss crab pots into the bay. In the evenings, I take him surfing, and we make our fires next to the jetty behind his house.
Once he asks me, while we sit above an ebb tide, “With the way you write about the sea, how could you ever leave?”
I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
When he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
“It’s a secret I learned from my Mother,” I tell him. “And her Mother’s Mother.”
The secret is that the sea is for a time. It covers us in dangerous beauty until we have been emptied out of what no longer suits us and then we, life in tow, venture inland to drier places, to higher peaks, to places where life sprawls out before us in new and important ways.
“But how will you leave this part of you behind?” he asks.
When he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
Then I was constantly at his side.
‘It will break my heart to leave,’ I say. Because I’ve finally learned all the ways the waves are different when there is an offshore wind, or how sometimes a current will bring in a blanket of jellyfish or kelp, and the topography of these washed-up remnants changes in cycles. This is blood from my own body.
But if we do not let our hearts break – if we do not leave ourselves from time to time, then we never have the pleasure of returning with something new.
I’ll leave with saltwater embedded in my bones and a new language for love that only this body of holy water could teach. I’ll take it to the mountains, and I’ll tell them what the ocean taught me. I’ll remind them of everything that lies out West.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,
rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in mankind.
Because the God who meets me in the water is not the God of the Sacramento valley, God of pot-holed streets and burning foothills, or even of the bustling city, or the sleepy mountain town, who demands a structured sort of worship, fully-clothed on bended knee. This is a God bound to multitudes of mistranslations, and this language needs nature to be whole. He cannot be only words in a book or even stories spoken aloud. He is made whole by a spirit so far outside of us, we cannot give it words. I can only imagine it as the sea, as wisdom, as the moving water thrumming through all that breathes.
I do not leave what lives inside me. I return to it by looking inward and sometimes by moving West. When I am away, I will remember what I always knew: that the sea and I took our first breath together. As I have been returning to it piece by piece all this time, it has been returning to me in equal measure.
Words by Lynnee Jacks
Lynnee Jacks is a writer and a mover. She explores the vast spaces between lives lived and unlived. Fascinated by myth and symbol, she crafts all kinds of art as odes to liminal spaces. Through her business, Sandstone Stories, she helps amplify the voices of people making big impacts in small communities. She also drafts scripts, poetry, and prose that explore the sacred patterns that emerge in our humanity and spirituality. When she’s not writing, you can find her practicing martial arts, surfing, or exploring in the mountains.
