The sound of the sea all through it

 I grew up land-locked and the mountains were my place, and I always thought they were my place, and I thought that the ocean did not mean much. Until it did. The yearning was slow at first, and unformed, and then a wave, a tide, a flood.

 I went to the coast, where I worked on a novel and was woken from each night’s sleep by the light of the moon through my bedroom window. I would get up and watch it, reflected on a still, grey lagoon. One night during that time my daughter and I walked down to the beach after dinner at a restaurant, to see a blood moon over the ocean. My daughter, an adult. I said to her ‘remember this’, but I am remembering it.

 I turn again to Virginia Woolf, to her diaries and her novels, my touchstones. This time I am seeking water sounds. How she wrote in her diary when she was making To the Lighthouse that ‘the sea is to be heard all through it.’ How she wanted the voices in The Waves ‘running homogenously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves.’

I hear water in and through her writing, and her sense of her writing, the slippery fish of her creative power.

‘What is the word for full of the sea?’ she asks.

 I have lately developed an annotation, a set of small waves, that I make in pencil next to references to and descriptions of the ocean in books. That way, I tell myself, I could go back, and join them up, and read every story as a sea narrative.

 Sometimes I think of my young pregnant body and I smile, because I once carried a sea within me.

Rachel Wright, Stoer Head Lighthouse, used with permission

Rachel Wright, The Deep, used with permission

Rachel Wright, Along the Shoreline, used with permission

The images on this page are of Rachel Wright’s embroidered textile art and are used with her kind permission.