There are places that stay in your bones.
For me, that place has always been the sea.
I was born near the ocean — on the west coast of a different continent — and although I now live 12,000 kilometers away, still I find myself by the shore, on another west coast, tracing the same horizon line with my eyes. The details have changed: the light, the birds, the temperature of the water. But the feeling? It’s the same. Familiar. Elemental. Like the sea is a language I was born speaking.
Each time I walk onto the sand, something quiet happens inside. I slow down, but more than that — I return to myself.
The ocean doesn’t ask anything of me.
It doesn’t care what I’ve achieved or failed to do.
It just is — vast, open, wild — and in its presence, I remember that I am too.
This morning, like many others, I brought a feather I found and began drawing a labyrinth in the sand.
Shell by shell, I marked a path — not to reach a destination, but to come back inward. My fingers pressed the lines into wet sand while the sea rolled in and the sun painted gold on the water.
And then, like always, the tide rose.
The lines blurred. The shells shifted.
And yet I didn’t feel any sense of loss. That’s the thing about the sea — it teaches you to let go.
To build anyway. To create beauty with full knowledge that it’s temporary.
I live a life shaped by many threads: clay under my nails, bees buzzing in my garden, words spilling into pages, rituals made of herbs, wax, and thread. But the sea is where I go to remember the oldest parts of myself. The parts no one sees, but that hold everything together.
People sometimes ask me if I miss “home.”
And yes — I do.
But I also carry home in my body.
In the way I notice the wind, in the pull of the tides on my dreams, in the spirals I draw in sand without even thinking.
So I come to the beach. I walk. I make. I listen.
Not to be productive, not to solve anything.
But to be in communion — with the world, with myself, with whatever is older than both.
Because even if the tide washes it all away…
the making, the being, the barefoot stillness — that stays.
