Seaweed Wisdom
The ocean swallowed me and spit me out
The ocean swallowed me and spit me out.
I was no more than 5. We lived in Manhattan Beach, California, a few blocks from the Pacific ocean. How many?-- I’m not sure. I started walking to the beach before I knew how to count blocks or read street signs. Sometimes with my mother and baby sister, sometimes with a babysitter, sometimes with a friend, and sometimes even alone. The beach was my home away from home and the ocean was my extended playground. As a young girl, I recall watching the waves roll in one after another in awe of their sheer size and force, daring myself to accept the invitation to play in swells countless times my size.
The first time I became aware of my own breath, I was body surfing when I was pulled under by a wave I will never know the size of. Once under, I was nothing more than another ocean creature subject to the chaotic centrifugal force of the churning current under what had been playful waves. I recall being spun around for what seemed like an eternity that would end without me ever seeing the sand again. I was pulled under before I could properly fill my lungs, so I wasn’t as much holding my breath as waiting for the moment to end--either under the water or on the beach. It was the first time I knew what it was like to need to breathe, before I even knew what it meant to “die.”
And then she spit me out. I don’t recall getting up or who, if anyone, was there. I only recall a sense of sheer fear followed by pure relief….an awareness that clung to me like seaweed even as the waves receded. Something had changed--the ocean had come alive. My personified playground was not so much unpredicably cruel as she was preoccupied with larger forces of nature than a tiny naive human girl. I didn’t hold her show of force against her. She gargled with me, swallowed me whole, and spit me out, unaware of my limbs, my lungs, my life. I now knew I was subject to her power and release. And I accepted the danger and chaos along with her beauty and thrill when I jumped back in…though perhaps not that day.
The Pacific Ocean is a wildly different creature than the Atlantic Ocean where I now live. Its waves are larger, the surf begins further out, and the rhythm is more relentless. It’s also colder. As a young girl, I only knew the friendly force of the Pacific and fear seemed irrelevant. You know how we can remember places larger than they actually are when we were children?--not so with the Pacific, which I return to every few years with the same awe and a dose of fear.
This second time I was trapped in the ocean, I remembered the fear of death. I was with my babysitter Judy and another boy she watched. Swimming in the surf after school, the boy caught my head between his legs and held me there under water for what seemed like an eternity, or at least too long for someone not to realize a human head was clamped in his vise. I wriggled helplessly, willing him to realize what he was doing until he released me. Back on the sand, I confusingly tried to narrate what happened, and only recall that he seemed ignorant of the cruelty of his act, and even somewhat laughed it off. But another seaweed strand of awareness had clung to me. I now knew what it was like to have my life briefly in someone else’s control.
It was frightening, yes, but something else—something confusing, something violating, something shaming. While he was too young to understand the potentially deadly consequence of his impulse, I allowed his ignorance to negate my terror. I defined my terrifying experience by an external response rather than my protective intuition. In that instant, I innocently exchanged the power of self-protection for the comfort of others. I vaguely recall not wanting to make him feel bad for hurting me and for not wanting my babysitter to feel responsible. At 5, I had learned to value the perception of others over myself.
The ocean did not intend to hurt me, and I’d like to think the prepubescent boy didn’t either--each was just behaving according to its nature. The ocean--an unpredictable and invisible force, itself subject to the dance of the universe. The boy--a dependent creature acting out the pleasure of an ignorant prank. Neither required forgiveness, but each required an understanding that I was too young to comprehend at the time. And really both moments were more about me than the external forces in control. Both moments of stolen breath left behind strands of seaweed, souvenirs of wisdom, keepsakes of dignity that preserved the fragile innocence of childhood and awakened me to the influence of external forces.
Fascinating! ! Have spent plenty of time in both oceans - lived near Manhattan ocean.