I took a road trip to Colorado with a friend a couple weeks ago. Largely to rescue their sister from a rough situation, but in reality because I miss my friend and I miss myself. I grew up traveling and then moving almost yearly. I'm USED to motion, but it's been a long decade and that's been inaccessible to me for a variety of reasons - too poor being one. But so we get in this car my friend's rented and just drive West. And you can do that! You can just go! But the thing this essay brought up for me was the sky. Sort of like how you came to meet the ocean, I went to meet the sky again.
I've been living in the East Coast for my adult life, fucked up between the Atlantic and the Blue Ridge and surrounded by the profligacy of civilization. It's been years since I've seen a sky free from obstructions. And then we got to Iowa. And I'm looking around sleep deprived and so PRESENT in a way that haven't been in months? Years? And there's this huge, sprawling sky over me from horizon to horizon and windmills and corn. Golden corn and blue sky and white clouds and tall, pale windmills. I was overcome. I wanted to cry, I might have a little actually. The world got so damn small and I needed so badly to remember that I am small and the world is large and that I'm not trapped.
I get now why settlers went West and saw God. How can you not? How can you not look at a sky that never ends and miss the divine? But it also made me really sad and a little angry too because...ugh I'm really tapped into environmental awareness right now and it's all...wrong. I saw two crops all the way across the damn country - corn and soybeans. That's it. Corn and soybeans. And where there wasn't crops it was invasive grasses or, worse, long mowed sections. My heart aches with the way we're failing this land. Failing ourselves. I don't want to just be in community with the people around me, but with the planet we're standing on and the creatures we share this world with and I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to reach out like that when it can't be just my hand.
I don't know, it's a lot of feelings. Everything's a lot of feelings.
Hitting post even though it feels vulnerable and scary. 🤘🏻😎
i only discovered how much i love the sea in my 20s - i grew up in very inland palmerston north, new zealand, a somewhat small, insular, quietly conservative university city that i was desperate to leave as soon as i had the chance, in large part due to an overwhelming few years filled with my first experiences of grief that I had no idea how to process. i had a lot of chances to be elsewhere, to be fair - my mum is an anthropologist and i was luckier than most in a childhood spent travelling the world, but somehow my eyes always skimmed over the sea. i was never really drawn to it. eventually, i went to university in the capital city wellington - pōneke - which is surrounded by the sea on almost all sides, endless bays to pull into, harbour and waterfront and just. so much blue. i managed to go two years living there before a sweltering summer spent slinging coffees to the rich wellingtonians finally pushed me towards evenings spent on the southernmost beach of the city, basking in the still blistering 6pm sun before eventually watching it set over the hills, going home and falling into bed with sand and salt crusted to my hair and skin, and for the first time, starting to love the way my skin darkened and darkened and darkened over those months (after years being surrounded by white kids and cowering inside to avoid looking even more different than i already did). the sea became a haven ever since - my favourite view, my favourite sight, smell, taste. it offered calm and companionship, an escape - having once been a swimmer, I had forgotten the relief that came from diving under the water and the whole world going silent for the precious seconds you stayed there. my next taste with grief was my first heartbreak while on an exchange in canada, and the weight that fell off my shoulders when i came home and sat in the sand at my favourite, freezing cold beach was unlike anything else.
last year, i moved from wellington, nz to london, england. it's been exciting and strange and hard to process, and it has felt kind of silly that one of the hardest things has been being so far from the sea. i came home for a few months from december til now (graduation, a friend's wedding) and especially right now, with everything else going on in the world, i don't think i have ever felt such broken relief at wading into the still, crystal clear water as many times as i can manage over this blink-and-it's-gone summer. i leave nz on the 10-year anniversary of a loss i am still trying to make sense of. perhaps even more heavy is that i never would have imagined, when leaving london in november, that the atrocities in palestine would still be ongoing by the time i made my way back there.
i think this beautiful piece hits now more than ever with what is happening in palestine, seeing the love and joy and peace and hope gazans find from the sea amidst so much, never-ending grief. it has certainly changed the way i see my relationship with grief and the sea; i think of palestine, of gaza, every time my feet hit the sand and the waves touch my skin. i think of grief and love and memory and resilience and between that and this piece and 10 years of grief and 5 years of loving the sea and being on the precipice of a new life (hopefully a new world) that feels so far away from the familiarity of this beauty and pain, i am just ever so grateful for words like yours making these feelings tangible the way you do.
I have only recently discovered you and your writing but I feel so much comfort and hope at getting to carry your teachings with me across the globe from one stage of life to another.
an unnecessary ramble maybe, but this piece really resonated. lots of love, thank you for writing it x
I took a road trip to Colorado with a friend a couple weeks ago. Largely to rescue their sister from a rough situation, but in reality because I miss my friend and I miss myself. I grew up traveling and then moving almost yearly. I'm USED to motion, but it's been a long decade and that's been inaccessible to me for a variety of reasons - too poor being one. But so we get in this car my friend's rented and just drive West. And you can do that! You can just go! But the thing this essay brought up for me was the sky. Sort of like how you came to meet the ocean, I went to meet the sky again.
I've been living in the East Coast for my adult life, fucked up between the Atlantic and the Blue Ridge and surrounded by the profligacy of civilization. It's been years since I've seen a sky free from obstructions. And then we got to Iowa. And I'm looking around sleep deprived and so PRESENT in a way that haven't been in months? Years? And there's this huge, sprawling sky over me from horizon to horizon and windmills and corn. Golden corn and blue sky and white clouds and tall, pale windmills. I was overcome. I wanted to cry, I might have a little actually. The world got so damn small and I needed so badly to remember that I am small and the world is large and that I'm not trapped.
I get now why settlers went West and saw God. How can you not? How can you not look at a sky that never ends and miss the divine? But it also made me really sad and a little angry too because...ugh I'm really tapped into environmental awareness right now and it's all...wrong. I saw two crops all the way across the damn country - corn and soybeans. That's it. Corn and soybeans. And where there wasn't crops it was invasive grasses or, worse, long mowed sections. My heart aches with the way we're failing this land. Failing ourselves. I don't want to just be in community with the people around me, but with the planet we're standing on and the creatures we share this world with and I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to reach out like that when it can't be just my hand.
I don't know, it's a lot of feelings. Everything's a lot of feelings.
Hitting post even though it feels vulnerable and scary. 🤘🏻😎
felt. thank you for sharing
i only discovered how much i love the sea in my 20s - i grew up in very inland palmerston north, new zealand, a somewhat small, insular, quietly conservative university city that i was desperate to leave as soon as i had the chance, in large part due to an overwhelming few years filled with my first experiences of grief that I had no idea how to process. i had a lot of chances to be elsewhere, to be fair - my mum is an anthropologist and i was luckier than most in a childhood spent travelling the world, but somehow my eyes always skimmed over the sea. i was never really drawn to it. eventually, i went to university in the capital city wellington - pōneke - which is surrounded by the sea on almost all sides, endless bays to pull into, harbour and waterfront and just. so much blue. i managed to go two years living there before a sweltering summer spent slinging coffees to the rich wellingtonians finally pushed me towards evenings spent on the southernmost beach of the city, basking in the still blistering 6pm sun before eventually watching it set over the hills, going home and falling into bed with sand and salt crusted to my hair and skin, and for the first time, starting to love the way my skin darkened and darkened and darkened over those months (after years being surrounded by white kids and cowering inside to avoid looking even more different than i already did). the sea became a haven ever since - my favourite view, my favourite sight, smell, taste. it offered calm and companionship, an escape - having once been a swimmer, I had forgotten the relief that came from diving under the water and the whole world going silent for the precious seconds you stayed there. my next taste with grief was my first heartbreak while on an exchange in canada, and the weight that fell off my shoulders when i came home and sat in the sand at my favourite, freezing cold beach was unlike anything else.
last year, i moved from wellington, nz to london, england. it's been exciting and strange and hard to process, and it has felt kind of silly that one of the hardest things has been being so far from the sea. i came home for a few months from december til now (graduation, a friend's wedding) and especially right now, with everything else going on in the world, i don't think i have ever felt such broken relief at wading into the still, crystal clear water as many times as i can manage over this blink-and-it's-gone summer. i leave nz on the 10-year anniversary of a loss i am still trying to make sense of. perhaps even more heavy is that i never would have imagined, when leaving london in november, that the atrocities in palestine would still be ongoing by the time i made my way back there.
i think this beautiful piece hits now more than ever with what is happening in palestine, seeing the love and joy and peace and hope gazans find from the sea amidst so much, never-ending grief. it has certainly changed the way i see my relationship with grief and the sea; i think of palestine, of gaza, every time my feet hit the sand and the waves touch my skin. i think of grief and love and memory and resilience and between that and this piece and 10 years of grief and 5 years of loving the sea and being on the precipice of a new life (hopefully a new world) that feels so far away from the familiarity of this beauty and pain, i am just ever so grateful for words like yours making these feelings tangible the way you do.
I have only recently discovered you and your writing but I feel so much comfort and hope at getting to carry your teachings with me across the globe from one stage of life to another.
an unnecessary ramble maybe, but this piece really resonated. lots of love, thank you for writing it x