Like most people around the world, our family has not ventured too far in the past five months. We haven’t taken any airplane rides. The most we’ve done is drive to El Paso to shelter-in at my laws house for a change of scenery. So we decided with just a few more weeks of summer break that we wanted to take a short trip to a beach on the Gulf coast. We rented a little house with another family, packed up our cooler and all the beach things we’d need for a few days and headed east out of Austin. As I expected, the time at the ocean was just what our family needed. And it got me thinking….
The thing I like best about the ocean is the way the wind and crashing waves makes talking less of an option. It’s hard to hear people at the beach unless you’re right up close. I find it blissful to simply sit and watch my people play in the muffling wind. Where I might have corrected a behavior or spoken up, I don’t at the ocean. No point. They wouldn’t even hear me unless I got out of this camping chair. So I wave and smile. They’ll work it out. I find myself smiling more than usual at the shore. I smile out at the waves and my children on the boogie boards. I smile up at the seagulls. I smile even while I’m readjusting the blanket that’s gotten sandy again. A smile and squint become one and the same at the beach.
And then there are smells. At the ocean I think about time periods past. How smelly life probably was in ages past. My 21st century nose doesn’t like a briny wetness. That mineral fishy odor that is the marina. The shore is both fresh and putrid. Sometimes in the same breeze. I feel how modern I am. How offended I am by anything less than the smell of a Target superstore. My daughter runs from the water to my chair. “Mom,” she’s screaming, “Mom!” I smile up at her. She’s holding a drippy seashell. “Mom, smell this shell.” I laugh and do. And the odor is unmistakably not land dwelling. I am the foreigner here.
At the beach I finally feel like my kids play…. in a way that I find fascinating. They run to the water’s edge and splash. And then in the next moment they are sitting in the sand by themselves, digging and humming a tune only they know. Completely and totally absorbed in their own tactile, sensory moment. I don’t dare interrupt. My daughter is digging a hole and holding up clumps of sand to examine, right to her face. My son is walking at the edge, head down riveted by what gets upended when the wave recedes. I could watch them play like this all day. I would like this to go on and on. Never return to a screen. They are the least self-conscious and the most beautiful here at the beach.
And as for me some complicated things seem simpler and simple things seem profound when I’m staring out at the ocean. I guess it’s the sense of perspective you get there.
Even though part of me wants to cradle fear, a different, more lasting piece wants to nurture hope. A pandemic has taught us that we can plan for tomorrow, but we can’t know what the days will hold. I want to trust God more. But God, help me to trust you more! I look out at the waves. Fashion me into something like them, Lord. Over and over again, I release. I guess this is what it means to be fully alive.
