the undercurrent of the sea

a musing on why i regard writing as sacred

Today, I found myself wrapped in the kind of simplicity that reminds you you’re alive.

Warm coffee in hand. Soft jazz murmuring in the background. And a worn paperback copy of The Awakening by Kate Chopin resting gently in my lap. I made it to page 21 when something stilled me.

There was a conversation between Adèle and Edna — and Edna’s response reached straight into the folds of my spirit. Adèle asked her what she had been thinking about as they overlooked the sea, and Edna, after a brief pause, said she hadn’t been consciously thinking of anything. But when she retraced and unveiled her thoughts, she found something there.

Something delicate. Something true.

And that’s when it happened. I felt the ocean stir within me. What moved me wasn’t just the words. It was the way Edna noticed. The way she didn’t rush her response, but rather opened herself up to her inner sea and invited Adèle, and me, to peer inside.

Without force. Without overthinking. Just an honest drift into awareness.

This is why I love writing. It’s why I regard it as sacred.

To write, and to read, is to listen with your whole body. It’s to sit at the edge of another person’s shoreline and let their waves lap against your feet. It’s to feel the pull of their tide without needing to conquer it, name it, or fix it.

It is to be there. To taste the salt of someone else’s world. To breathe in the undercurrent of their sea.

In Edna’s simple pause, I saw the truth of my own pauses. In her silence, I saw my own reflection. And in the way she returned to herself — quietly, inwardly — I was reminded of what I’ve always known:

Writing is remembering. Writing is reverence. Writing is return.

We live in a world that tries to make everything urgent, everything marketable, everything fast.

But reading Edna, like watching the ocean, reminded me that some things only speak in stillness. This is the art of feminine attention. The sacred act of holding a moment without grasping it. Of bringing our seas to form through our words.

So, here I am: in the simplicity of morning, in the softness of jazz, in the pages of Edna’s awakening and the unfolding of my own.

May I always write this way: from pause, from presence, from the undercurrent of my own sea.