My Inner Child is a Mermaid

I’ve always been drawn to water, it’s my happy place.  I was born in Seattle, my maternal family are long time Washingtonian fisherman, and 20 years of my life was spent growing up on the shores of the Hood Canal and Puget Sound.  Now, after 14 years of living in high desert climes I have returned to my beloved.  Newly 40, newly engaged and newly unemployed, I quit my job, gathered my teenage daughter, college-age son and aging mother to follow my fiancé who was offered a job transfer to the Oregon coast.

All this newfound free time has given me ample opportunity to mind-wander.  I wonder if ocean fascination is particular to those of us in the west.  Do people in Kansas dream of dipping their toes in this great sea too?  I could spend hours watching the ocean waves crash against the rocks, eddying between boulders, or just quietly ebbing & flowing with the tides.  There is such a pull that I think it must be primordial.  Is it because we evolved from ocean dwelling creatures and that salty water still circulates in our blood?  Or is it not so far back, remembering our time in the womb and living (and breathing!) in this watery cocoon.  My new status – as an unemployed (almost) housewife after years of being single and fiercely independent has caused me to re-evaluate my role in my house as well as the greater society.  Mother nature, mother earth . . . why do we feminize these things, is it fickleness of weather, power of storms, cyclic-ness of seasons that remind of us of the women in our life?  Is it a compliment or an insult? 

In the past, it was believed that a women’s cycle corresponded with the moon’s cycle with ovulation at the full moon and menses at the new moon.  Now that we are not dependent on natural light and nature’s bounty, have we become out of tune? “Normal” menstrual cycles are based on lunar months of 28 days, the same lunar cycles that regulate the tides.  Can we blame our shift towards man-made everything for irregularity?  I’m not a hippie-granola-non deodorant wearing-hairy armpits-earth mother by any means, but maybe we’ve come too far from our origins.  Something to ponder?

“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

 

"It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea--whether it is to sail or to watch it--we are going back from whence we came."
- John F. Kennedy