There is something so intensely beautiful about the ocean. Something so calming and cathartic. No matter how bad I am feeling, the sea knows how to heal it. When I swim in the ocean, it feels like mother nature is giving me a hug or that I am returning to the womb; it is the best feeling in the world. It is comfort in it’s greatest form. The Sea is a giver and taker of life and I know she has saved mine, many times.

The Surgery of the Sea
From How to Save Your Own Life

At the furthermost reach of the sea
where Atlantis sinks under the wake of the waves,
I have come to heal my life.

I knit together like a broken arm.
The salt fills the crevices of bone.
The sea takes all the fragments of my lives
& grinds them home.

I wake up in a waterbed with you.
The sea is singing & my skin
sings against your skin.
The waves are all around us & within.
We sleep stuck to each other‘s salt.

I am healing in your arms.
I am leaning to write without the loss of love.
I am growing deeper lungs here by the sea.
The waves are knives; they glitter & cut clean.

This is the sea‘s surgery.
This is the cutting & the healing both.
This is where bright sunlight warms the bone,
& fog erases us, then makes us whole.

© Erica Mann Jong