It does not hold anything.
That is the first thing. The wave comes and does its full work and pulls back and the next wave comes and does its full work and the sea does not accumulate, does not keep a record of the previous waves, does not brace for the next one based on what the last one cost. Every wave is complete in itself. Every wave arrives without the weight of all the waves before it.
I have been watching it do this for years and I am still learning.
My particular difficulty is the not-keeping-the-record. I am a woman who keeps records. Who remembers what was said in the meeting in 2009 and who said it and what it cost and what the cost accumulated to over the following decade. Who carries the full weight of the history into the present tense and finds the present tense heavier for it. Who arrives at the new thing with the residue of all the old things still present, informing, sometimes usefully, often not.
The sea does not do this.
The sea has no opinion about the previous waves. The sea has no residue from the winter storms and the calm stretches and the particular summer afternoon when it was flat as glass and looked like a different substance entirely. The sea just keeps arriving. Full, each time. Unencumbered by its own history. Doing its work and releasing it and doing the next work.
I stood at the edge of it in February, in Loreto, in the particular quality of early morning light that belongs to that coast, and I thought: I want to learn to arrive that way. Full. Without the accumulated residue of the arriving I have already done. Present to this shore and not still standing on the last one.
I am still learning.
The sea is patient with my learning. The sea has been doing this longer than I have been watching it and will be doing it long after I am done watching. It has time. I am taking notes. Slowly, imperfectly, arriving a little more fully each time, setting down a little more of what I was carrying from the shore before.
