The Sea as Soul-Maker

When I was a child, two sounds soothed me to sleep each night: the washing machine in the basement and the bell buoy in the bay.

The liquid repetitiveness of the washing machine churning laundry in its gullet contrasted with the intermittent knelling of the bell as it warned ships away from the shoreline. The sloshing of the laundry was constant, a miniature tide, perhaps recalling the transformation of my mother’s heartbeat into surf when heard through the fluid medium of the uterine atmosphere. Before he went downstairs to tend to the tide of laundry, my father kissed us goodnight, and so the whirring respiration of sheets, towels, and clothing became for me an extension of his love. I could sleep safely, knowing that my father was hovering over both the laundry and my dreams.

The clanging of the bell buoy, softened by the distance of our house from the bay to a haunting muted chime, resonated with a different emotional key. The tame whirlpool of the washing machine exuded homeyness and a parent’s protective love. The minor-key rippling of the bell buoy across water and onto land incarnated longing. The hum of the laundry enfolded and comforted me. The ringing of the bell buoy summoned me. The washing machine prepared the soft cocoon of my sleep; the bell buoy gave me my dreams. The washing machine fashioned the emotional lineaments of home; the bell buoy called me away from home.

Or perhaps the resonant yet evanescent tone of the bell led me back to my primordial home, a place both numinous and familiar. It spoke the language of the sea, and we are all born of ocean: the personal ocean of the womb, with our mothers’ heartbeats shining on us like water-blurred moons, and collectively, the ocean from which all life emerged billions of years ago. In as many different ways as there are human minds, we seek the paradox between the washing machine and the bell buoy: the need for home and the need for the journey of meaning-making that lures us away from home, and then the eventual return with our deepest being transformed.

My language grew with my body and my understanding, so when I was very young, I did not yet own the words to conceptualize the difference between the need for shelter and the need for something to yearn toward. Plants incarnate these two impulses in their patterns of growth: they seek soil with their roots to provide a secure connection with the earth that nurtures them, while they simultaneously seek sky with their stems and leaves to find the light that feeds them. They never reach the sun, but their longing for it sustains their lives.

I plunged into my earliest dreams between the throb of home and the knelling of away, both of which spoke in languages of water. To clean our garments and the other fabric necessities of our home, the washing machine channeled a tame sea into its bowels and directed it in a tidy orbit. Outside, the bell buoy undulated on the moods of the sea to warn ships of those changing emotional tides and the nearness of the night-dimmed land. Home was water; the life’s quest whose first intimations manifested in my early dreams was also water.

Over time, I introduced myself to water in many guises, and my formative relationships with it caused me to regard it from the beginning as a third parent. My paternal grandfather was a long-distance swimmer. Though he did not swim competitively, on weekends he regularly waded through the breakers on the beach near his Brooklyn home and swam into the channel, among islands, into the sea. His example inspired me to swim the diameter, and later the circumference, of the fifty-acre lake in northeastern Pennsylvania where I spent my summers. I also befriended the Throgs Neck Bay where the bell buoy sang to me, though over the years, the increasing pollution dissuaded me from immersing myself there.

Oceans, rivers, and lakes have become my extended family. Today I live a few miles from the northern Oregon coast, and my year-round bicycle ride to work brings me into the ambit of the sea’s thunder. I adore this enveloping sound; it is both journey and return. Winters swell with wild glory: tempestuous winds and reckless rainstorms alternating with swoons of blue sky. The summer calm bears the salt tang of the open ocean to the stillness of the sand. I cannot be parted long from water; it is my second breath. My heart reaches its ripest when I am pacing the margin between sea and land, paddling in Nehalem Bay or on the Willamette River, or squatting to observe delicate marine life in a tidepool.

The washing machine, the bell buoy, and above all the ocean meeting fresh water in the Throgs Neck Bay all have my gratitude for fashioning my soul out of their seas.