You’re on the shore of the Pacific. It’s January in Oregon. If there has ever been a time when it seemed reasonable to expect bushes to burst into flame and start talking, this is not it—not unless you know Morse code and hear words in the drips.
Your sense of self-preservation is fully intact; you’re not expecting God to start talking out of the waves. Then a friend, next to ou, asks is the ocean calling you? And you realize, it is. The ocean wants you.
Before you know it you’re calf-deep in undertow, sucking the sand out from under your footsoles. The ocean wants you whole, not a scrap left behind. This calling. The flung spray over green-as-glass curves. The rush, the whisper. You want to take the breakers in your arms. You make a running start, but full-tilt goes wobbly once the water has your knees. Where you put your feet is moving.
Then the sand bank ends and you’re in deep, smack in the face and cold all over—but free, and the waves gentle once your feet are off the ground. Every hair on your head is a salt thing now. This water could batter you limp and drag you away, but instead it’s rocking, nudging you shoreward. One more swell, then you let it carry you in, set you down on your knees where the surf pounds and sucks and your legs are useless till a wave sweeps up and staggers you out, ankle-deep in foam.
You can hear gulls again. Rocks tick against each other as the wave slips away.
You are a thing of air and ground. The rain feels warm.
You are a thing of water. You return to your kind now, breathers, walkers on feet. But there is salt in your ears, and even once it stops rattling over your eardrums, you will carry this song inside you, the surge and whisper of God’s bottomless longing for you.