What would I be...

... for Knots in the String.

‘What would I be if I hadn’t turned to the sea…’

I heard a version of this question this week as I listened to the Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland. Being an audiobook, I couldn’t just flip back the page but the words, even if I have them in the wrong order, sparked a conversation with me, myself and I.

‘For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea.’ E. E. Cummings

I met the sea for the first time as a baby. I believe I loved it. Water and I were synchronous, we bonded. Water was my first and perhaps my only skin. I learned to swim very early, and my childhood was a bit like Ratty’s life. Dabbling on the river’s edge, if not the ocean shore, messing about with boats and being forever coated in white sand and then swimming, always swimming.

I think it’s why I feel a connection with Ringland’s novel. It’s about the sea, about coast and connection, about the links between myth, legend and the sea. I felt no such thing with Ringland’s first novel – I’m not a creature of the Australian interior. The dry, the red bulldust, kilometre after kilometre of aching heat haze, harsh azure sky and stunted plant growth.

That’s the mermaid speaking. The one who, when her car rounds a corner of the Tasman Highway, when she catches that first glimpse of the Coxscomb of Maria Island, sighs with relief, casting all else aside. Her heart aches with joy. There is the river flowing to the sea and there is the sea – sparkling or stormy, flaccid or furious and she is content.

Last week was birthday week, and my family gave me two substantial gift vouchers. One book I have placed on order, a book which has been singing to me since I saw the cover two weeks ago. I say sing, because such books are like sirens and selkies, enticing the sea farer. The book is Charlotte Runcie’s Salt on Your Tongue. ‘An ode to the ocean, and the generations of women drawn to the waves…(The Guardian.)’ Thus I venture to ask myself why I need to read these books now. I have a whole sea life behind me after all. I wonder if it’s because I relate, I share the same feelings and there’s nothing if not comfort in someone feeling the same…

Another was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea, first published in 1955. It sang to me too and I picked it up as a purchase without even reading the blurb. Since then, one line I read has stayed with me: ‘One learns in beach living, the art of shedding …One finds one is not shedding just clothes, but vanity…’ How true. One can have no vanity when one wears old shorts, faded jeans, jumpers that are worn and tired, with a weft woven with love of the sea, and a warp that has the tang of salt drifting up from the folds. I hark back to Ringland’s ‘seven skins’ and I wonder if perhaps we all shed skins by the sea. Perhaps it’s intrinsic.

Anyway, what price vanity when the wind grabs at hair and tangles strands like torn spider’s webs, and eyes sting and run as the sea breeze dries them out. In addition, I’m forever shielded by a sunvisor to try and protect my skin from damaging sun. Is that vanity, I ask? Remembering that I’ve already lost 1/3^rd of my ear to skin cancer and that I have a number of scars elsewhere for the same reason. It matters little in the scheme of things – just that I, my freckles and wrinkles can’t be seen, and who cares anyway?

Lindbergh says, ‘I love my seashell of a house…’ and I thought, yes! We fit in our tiny cottage like hermit crabs in shells. Safe, cosy, yet as with all shells, able to hear the suck and sigh of the waves as they ebb and flow.

Would I have been a different creature without the sea? Of course, but the sea gives me courage, I’m rarely afraid of it despite that I respect it hugely. It supports me in times of crisis – through death and loss, through finding tenacity to cope with family accidents and life-changing illnesses. It murmurs to me, ‘There there…’ or it yells at me, ‘Toughen up!’

And so I dive under and through. I hear the song of the deeps. Whale song and dolphin speak, crayfish and crab conversation twined round and round in amber and brown ribbons of kelp. I’ve said before, if you sink under the sea and listen, it’s a tick, tick tick sound, amplified by fathoms of water.

‘When anxious, uneasy, and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.’ Rainer Maria Rilke

I drip wet sand through my fingers and make a medieval castle of turrets and moats, but a wave comes, and it is reduced to seashore in moments. Transient, here and then gone – a metaphor for our lives, surely. But it doesn’t matter. There’s more sand and more sea and Lindbergh tells us the sea teaches us simplicity and solitude, so time enough to build it all over again.

Music? No, a trailer instead. A sweet film filled with the breath of legend. I loved The Secret of Kells from the same team and this one is just as beautiful…

‘The waves sucked and sighed

In the silence

And sleep slid

Into the spaces…’ Prue Batten

Night night, friends…