I first considered the sea’s power in the summer of 2021, on a peninsula in the southwest of Ireland.
Watching it turn and hiss, the word that came to mind was Yirah. A Hebrew word which means awe, worship, and fear.
The idea that fear and worship were close together, or inextricable, fascinated me.
The word always made me think of the classical music conservatory I frequented as a child and teenager. My teacher there was stern, intimidating- my mother called her formidable. At the helm of our orchestra, she reached out her hands with poise and precision, and transformed 50 children into one churning ocean of sound.
It was a powerful thing to be inside of.
A loud, inhuman force.
Her eyes sharp and grey like the sea, and wicked, and funny. I loved her, there is no other word for it. It was a love that was a knife’s-edge away from terror.
As I aged, I learned to get over my intimidation. Our lessons were one-on-one, and to be a child alone in a room with someone who was so stern, critical and authortative was a masterclass in self-possession. I often thought that my musical education was really more of an education in confidence, and in holding an unflinching gaze. Over the years, Yirah became friendship, became mutual respect, and finally, a memory.
If that was my first encounter with g*d-fear, I had metabolised it quickly. I had reduced it to the size of a mere mortal.
*
My Granny Delia, who I rechristened “Nana”, could not swim.
She told me once that if you are about to drown, you bob up to the surface three times- like three last chances- before you sink to the floor.
“I knew this,” she told me, “so when I came close to drowning, I made sure to count. The first time I bobbed up, I tried to call or help- but my mouth was full of water! I tried again the second time, and made a small sound. Then- I knew it was my last chance- I screamed. They heard me then, thanks be to god. It was my last chance, you know! That would have been the last of me!”
I wondered how a woman could get to ninety years old and not know how to swim. It was true that I wasn’t a great swimmer yet either, but then again, I was only 6-and-a-quarter years old. The problem was that I was so tall that people might think that I was seven or eight, and wonder why an eight year old was still in the baby pool with her little brothers.
This was a huge concern of mine, along with the fact that I also didn’t know how to ride a bike.
Nana couldn’t swim but she could ride a bike. In fact, she had been cycling the day she first saw a tomato. She spotted it in a shopfront in Mullingar and mistook it for an apple- the reddest, plumpest apple anyone had ever seen. She bought it with the plan of devouring it on the way home, and was bitterly disappointed when she bit into its flesh.
How strange the texture must have seemed to her then.
To speak to Nana was to glimpse into another world. It was a lesson in imagining how a tomato must look to someone who has never seen one before, how sinister and unnatural, and also how unnatural I must have seemed to her.
It wasn’t until later that I began to consider that perhaps she’d never learned to swim because she was busy doing other, braver things.
She told my dad once that her biggest fear had always been that one of her children would have a child out of wedlock, raised outside of her faith.
It must have taken an unimaginably big and resilient heart for her to recover from her bitter disappointment. to adore and not fear her first heathen grandchild, to pick her up from school each day and walk home together in matching wool coats, to feed her tomato soup, spoon after spoon.
*
Because I was sick, we decided to hide in M’s parents’ caravan the summer of 2021. In Dublin, restrictions had eased and the party was recommencing. I knew I could not join my friends in bars and parties until I was vaccinated. I was sick already, and nobody recommended attempting two sicknesses at once. I avoided the waves of virus and replaced them with waves of grey, blue and green.
That summer we spent foggy mornings working furiously on our computers. In the evenings, when the fog had burned off the peninsula, we ate enormous quantities of vegetables, tofu and rice, poured glasses of wine, laughed, and sometimes cried.
On some level I blamed myself for my sickness.
On some level, I believed that my body could not be this infected if my soul and psyche were pure.
Once or twice I spent twilights walking alone on the beach. I stood before a raging sea in the late evening light and thought, yes, this is Yirah. The smallness of my body compared to this infinite water. The sea’s terrible noise, the wind, the crashing.
What I rememeber was this giddiness, this huge relief, to have found a place in the world so fast and empty and loud and terrifying that I could not have disturbed it if I tried. A place where I could expand to my fullest capacity and not take up too much space. For the first and only time in my life, I screamed with every inch of myself, the biggest that I could produce, nothing held back, no good manners, no shame.
What came out of me, I did not recognise as myself, as my own.
It pleased me, the way the scream got lost in the wind and the crashing waves. When I finally let this infinite and terrifying darkness leave me, the sea did not flinch.
Maybe we search for g*ds because we need someone on whom we can unleash our rage and fury and grief without it weighing them down.
We, who are so afraid of disturbing the earth, as if it were so fragile as to be broken by our anger.
*
When I almost drowned in Malaga last November, I was on the way to the airport, to visit my dying uncle back in Ireland.
In Deborah Levy’s August Blue, her protagonist, too, almost drowns just before visiting a dying friend:
“I was trying to tell him I loved him. But the words would not come out of the wild sea. Every time I tried to haul them to shore, a wave tumbled and crashed and silenced them.”
I did not return to the sea after drowning for several months. When I experienced a racing heart, cold sweats and general volatility, I didn’t know whether to attribute it to the sea or to love turned harsh by grief.
The power of the natural world is a humbling thing.
But humbling myself made living lighter, too. To blame myself for my sickness was like blaming myself for the tides.
My job was to keep up the awe side of things. Like viola lessons, life is a masterclass in holding an unflinching gaze.
*
My grandmother used to drive me to Howth harbour and walk with me and her two sisters out to the lighthouse, the wind and waves whipping and turning, her sisters small and fierce in their veils and black uniforms.
They were raised to love the world with humility, obedience and fear. I loved the world with unearned bravado.
It was a long shot, trying to love each other with such different definitions of love and fear, but the effort we made was formidable.
If some of those efforts were crushed before they got to shore, perhaps there were forces bigger than us to blame.
*
Last month I got into the sea in Portiragnes, France, while visiting my friend Sarala. We waded in together, and I was the first to take the plunge. It was my first swim since drowning. I felt calm and safe. Around us the water was quiet, blueish grey and smooth as silk.
I felt intimate with the sea, in a way. I was safe, but I knew the terms of our relationship better than before. Full in the knowledge of my own smallness, and in the knowledge of mortality.
I was aware of the indulgence of the cold droplets on our warm summer bodies, and the absurdity of that indulgence within the terrifying convulsions of the world. I was in awe of us, three women treading water and talking and searching for beauty in a vast and unknowable universe.
This is what it is to go on living in the world. It is an ordinary thing to do but that doesn’t make it any less formidable.