Prayer to Sea
Earlier this year I entered the Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers, founded by Natasha Carthew and I am thrilled to announce my ‘Prayer to Sea’ was chosen as the winning piece.
Prayer to Sea
Yes, it will be cold. Bitingly so.
She will strip the sensation from your fingertips and the soles of your feet, until you can no longer feel the sand’s roughness. The tide-worn smoothness of the mussel shell, discarded by a bivalve-hunting beach bird, will go unnoticed under your toes.
It’s okay. It is necessary.
She’s asking you to meet her in a different place. A quiet place. Outside of your head. Defenceless.
It will not work without discomfort.
You must leave your earth-bound body: the one that slips and trips across seaweed-slathered rocks, stumbling gracelessly over the sand. This must be swapped for seal skin. For weightlessness. Once the exchange has been made, then you should sink beneath the surface, and in your new form dive under the waves so that your belly scrapes the seabed. Here you can stare through jade opaqueness, towards deeper waters.
When you rise again, rise in trust.
Sit with her awhile. Feel strength in her embrace. Trust her enough to hold you aloft, star-shaped and salt-soaked, like an offering to the seabirds above you: the white wraiths of kittiwakes that speak their names in endless loops, arrow-necked cormorants, and gannets with eyes made of open oceans. They will inspect you, size you up like a sprat in a shoal. But ultimately it is she who decides.
When you have offered yourself numbly to the water and she has offered you to the birds, you can ask for the thing you came for. Not a confession as such, more of a cleansing, a shedding even.
In this moment you may request permission to leave parts of yourself for the tide to take.
The bitter parts. The dark parts. The loud, relentless questioning. The voice that sounds strangely like you but speaks words that are not yours. The thoughts that cloud your judgement like the sheen of sewage on a clear pond.
It’s okay. These are her favourite things. She clings to them the way sailors cling to siren song. She devours them; pries them out of their storm-grey shells and chokes back the innards like a herring gull does the beak-slashed carcass of a fish.
She will take them all from you. They are hers now. And you are cleaner, freer, quieter for a short time. At least until the waves call you back again to greet her and ask for her blessing once more.
Leaving is hard but go back to your body smiling. Let the breeze kiss your shoulders and the sun suck the salt from your skin. And if you do return, which of course you will, know she will always welcome you back. For the price of a small ritual: chilled hands, goose-bumped flesh, and an offering of your darkest, bitterest parts. A willingness to surrender to the stillness of gentle tides and seabird cries. That is all. Your prayers in sea.
Yes, it will be cold. But it will be worth it.
