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Oh I do like to be beside the seaside! Oh I do like to be beside the sea!
As term ends in Wiltshire schools this week and Dorset school-based colleagues wake up this morning to the first official day of the holidays, my thoughts have turned to the seaside and the spiritual connection many of us feel when we visit a beach, feel the sea breeze on our faces and witness the power of the ocean.
For me, there is something special about being beside water, to hear a stream trickling over stones or waves rushing up the beach over the shingle.
Our recent ancestors (Georgians and Victorians) put Britain’s seaside towns on the map as the railways arrived and people flocked there to seek the ‘health-giving’ air and environment. Recent research confirms that people indeed feel a spiritual dimension to the seaside experience. These include ‘a sense of connection, awesomeness, timelessness and nothingness’.
In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The Sound of the Sea
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I hope that during this summer season we might all have time for a break - however short. And if like me, you hope to take some time by the sea, we will be able to experience the sounds, smells and tastes that fill our senses and allow the connection to God’s Creation and nature’s majesty to stir our souls, to heal us and rejuvenate us.
And I have a plan in the event that an actual seaside visit is not possible this summer…. Instead, I will walk up on to Salisbury Plain on a windy day, turn my face to the sky, plug in my earphones and listen to this. With my eyes closed and the breeze on my skin, I feel sure I will be able to imagine the waves!
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