The lonely sea and the sky

I've been longing to visit the sea again.

As a child my sisters and I were lucky enough to go on holidays to Wales, holidays sunlit in memory, full of the present and the unconscious and unspoken gratitude of children. They were times of buckets and spades, clear air and sound sleep, safety and gentleness.

It seems that the sea is often calling, and as an adult I have come to associate this same call with a more general longing, hard to articulate but definitely present. To me, John Masefield's beautiful poem ‘Sea Fever’, particularly the first verse, encapsulates not only his profound love of sea but something more as well:

I must go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

But what are we longing for, we adults who turn our faces to the sea breeze and close our eyes to hear better that gravelly fall of the waves? Is it simply a nostalgia for childhood, of an innocence passed that we think can never be reclaimed, or is it something more? Throughout our lives, albeit infrequently, we might feel that same sense of innocence, that abiding in the present, that remembrance of the half-forgotten scent of a place we love. That place is home, and we'll greet it with tears of joy and recognition when we reach it.

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