Sea Glass

On By Shayleene MacReynoldsIn creativewriting

I try to think back on when I first fell in love with water—fell in love with storms.  I think it was, perhaps, the whimsey that my father breathed into the lore—the way he made rain seem like magic.  How he never made us come inside once it’d begun.

With water, I have a strange relationship.  Far too often nearly drowned off of the California coast, the ocean is some 17th century romantic beast.  I watch the way her hair curls.  I hear the way she roars and I fear her.

And yet, the waves seduce me.  I will always step back into the sea.  I like the way the salt smells on my skin, how my long hair hangs, drenched and heavy, down my back.

Perhaps it is the water inside storms that I am drawn to.  The way the sky, its swollen belly, hangs heavy just above my head.  I could reach a finger out and poke the clouds, and watch the tumult settle down to earth.

There is something inside water.  Something wild and unfixed.  It demands growth and change—it forces movement.  Without words, it passes to us certain hungers, certain thirsts.

Water breaks so we may enter.  From the fluid, we are born.  Humans carry water in their bodies and their blood but only mothers carry it inside their wombs.  When I look out on the ocean, I see a great big mother-space.  The biggest of them all.  Perhaps this water is the key to our rebirth—a certain baptism by salt and brine.

I wonder, if I gathered all the men inside my family, and swept them up into the sea, how would they emerge?  If I whispered secrets of the waters in their ears and taught them how to roar could they become another thing entirely?

Through dissolution, water breaks things open.  It uncovers and reveals.  Withdrawn tides, the way they show us glimpses of the treasures of a seafloor.  How sharp and broken glass becomes smooth stones.

If I left them all to soak inside the water, like buoys floating in the surf, then maybe when I gathered them back up, they’d look a bit more like themselves.

15 thoughts on “Sea Glass”

  4. Water is life. We search the galaxy for water for this reason: everywhere we find liquid water on Earth we find life managing to live in it. Yellowstone geysers superheated beyond boiling carry life– microorganisms adapted to the extreme. Ocean floor volcanic vents miles beneath the surface are teeming with life adapted to the corrosive, acidic volcanic chemistry, water hot enough to melt lead, scorching heat hundreds of degrees hotter than liquid water up at sea level would evaporate, without the tons of crushing pressure under miles of seawater, keeping liquid water from turning to steam. Alien creatures found nowhere else live among the volcanic vents, in complete darkness surviving the conditions we consider hell, flourishing in fact because there’s water. Water trapped millions of years in the microscopic interstices of rock miles underground, seeped from oceans and rivers millions of years vanished, hold life today, as far as we know completely isolated from our surface ecosystems.

    So we search the universe for water. Because water is life everywhere we know it. We found ice on Mars, there was once an atmosphere and oceans, lakes, and rivers. So we hypothesize there must have been life. Or still is. Liquid water probably still exists somewhere under Mars’ surface, so there could be life there. Europa is the smoothest celestial object in our solar system, a moon orbiting Jupiter. It’s surface smoothed by water ice. There’s likely oceans of liquid water beneath Europa’s surface, we find life surviving everywhere else we find water on Earth. Water is, figuratively and literally, life.

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    1. It took me a day or two to really be able to read this and soak it in. Sometimes my own bubble of existence is so small that I forget the very ways that all of human experience is directly correlated with nature. Thanks for bringing me back into that physicality of presence. A lot of connections here to ponder. Love it. ❤

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    1. It is so complicated, because I am inclined to think that nothing is truly of our own choosing. Which makes accountability challenging. All of us victims in one way or another–it leaves so much room for processing. And yet, few answers.

      Thank you, as always, for your thought provoking words friend. ❤

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