My children and I heard Dar Williams sing “The Ocean” with my Brother and his family at a free concert in Freeport, Maine several summers ago. She forgot some of the words and her collective memory, the audience, jarred them loose again. Who would have thought such grace could be shared in an L L Bean parking lot.
I went back to the ocean today
With my books and my papers I went to the rocks by the ocean
But the weather changed quickly, oh the ocean said
"What are you trying to find, I don't care, I'm not kind
I've bludgeoned your sailors, I've spat out their keepsakes
Oh it's ashes to ashes, but always the ocean, "
— Dar William, The Ocean
My mind slips back to what the ocean said, “What are you trying to find, I don’t care, I’m not kind…” And I think, looking at mountains, my personal Westward journey was an attempt “to show you that I was more land than water.” And maybe I was wrong to try.
Growing up and moving away is a transgression of feeling “at-home”. That sense of home is something we aspire to create anew in our own lives. It is not that we wish to return to the womb, but rather, it is the desire to have a place we belong, a safe harbor to “weather out” the storm.
"You don't know how precious you are, walking around with your little shoes dangling
I am the one who lives with the ocean.
It's where we came from, you know, and sometimes I just want to go back
After a day, we drink til we're drowning, walk to the ocean, wade in with our work boots
Wade in our work boots, try to finish the job.”
— Dar William, The Ocean
