A Bittersweet Beginning Hotel Hell: The Doomed, The

To Feel: What the Ocean Has Taught Me

Ella Rose Nicholls

I did not feel affiliated with any spirituality. Until I met the ocean. Or to put it better, until I knew the ocean. In actual fact I met her when I was very young, but I only truly found her when I grew older. I swam and played and listened to the blood rush through my veins inside seashells. But it was all fun. All games. I did not listen to the sermons, the wisdoms, the joys, the fears and the aspirations I was being gifted by the ocean. To find these things I would have to learn and grow and become subsumed by the ocean. This took me some time.

I know people who are going to die too young. Giving your heart to someone has only ever ended in sadness. I am not everything to some people. And now I’m sitting with feelings I had only heard about. Life seems to get harder with age. But I keep coming back to the ocean.

I left my life in this landlocked prison and travelled to the coast, to my home. For seven days I escaped, for seven days I swam. I returned with my hair wavy. Full of salt. I felt terrible but I was stronger, more resilient. Fortified. The wash and the waves had called me into question and demanded I face the things that I was unsuccessfully trying to escape. Learning to sit with feelings and being confident in the knowledge they would eventually pass. The ocean speaks whispers of things I can only learn through time. Nothing is stagnant. Waves come and go, they return to the ocean, part of an evermoving entity. My life mimics the tide, it is stable and predictable – I am nothing special – but still it crashes and it roars and it throws me around, filling my lungs until it’s impossible to breathe. I use the water to physically escape. The feeling of freezing waves in the crisp birth of August is a pain I know I can endure, a feeling I can control and stop at any time. It is suffering, but it is chosen, an act of empowerment. Its physicality has granted me a metaphor, a way to process change. The ocean is a teacher.

My first lesson came through research. A long drive and a short flight to a tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef to monitor the dying coral. To tell important scientists information they already knew. The reef is disappearing. Concrete and disappointing, I researched the length and lines and faded hues in the banks of the island and I felt nothing. Compartmentalised the impending doomsday.

Then, one night, I couldn’t sleep. After hours of torrential tossing and turning it was finally sunrise, it was finally an acceptable time to put on my swimmers and dive into the ocean. Tackle the side of the island not protected by a reef. I am a strong swimmer but this was dangerous. Deciding not to take my research with me, instead I chose to leave it stranded beneath my bed half-finished. It only served as a reminder of the unfeeling and impersonal observations about the underworld. I didn’t want that.

Fitting my mask and flippers. Feeling a certain level of regret. It was so cold. But the sunrise crept through the clouds, beckoning me into the shallows. Under water the light pierces, fracturing the crystal skin. I felt the tingle of something unfamiliar. A force I hadn’t yet reconciled within myself. Peace. I was awoken. In this awakening I realised my exhaustion. I became newly aware of how much I had been holding in my chest and how taxing that had become. The ocean held me. I closed my eyes and felt every goose bump. When they opened, I was surrounded. Twenty turtles. The most surreal, beautiful piece of art I have ever seen. You can’t touch turtles, even though they are friendly, even though they stare and wave and brush against your leg. You cannot touch them. That would be unkind. If we were to stroke and pry, they would be liable to unlearn everything the ocean has taught them.

In that moment. Focused on nothing but the creatures who had chosen to observe me that morning, I let go. I felt something. I felt magic.

There is nothing I believe in more fervently than magic. Magic. The ocean is magic. Intrinsically linked to feelings I have no way of articulating. Sometimes music sounds how the ocean feels. A point I cannot say anything further about, there isn’t a way I know how. It engages the brain in ways that are whole and complete. Some people call it God, water is used to signify holy redemption for a being bigger than us here on earth. Only it, in its grandeur, can grant ablution. Others find oceanic spirituality from the gems, the pearls and shells on the shore. Magic is in the ocean, in its magnitude of power, it keeps me coming back, engulfing me in a continued experience I can only comprehend as ethereal. I am connected to a spirituality previously undiscovered. Mostly, the ocean acts as a constant force. Something calming and reliable that I can pin my woes upon.

Mercurial in its liquidity, the ocean only reflects. It does not absorb or reject. The love I feel, the time I give. It bounces back to me. I am shown what I am. What I deserve. I am given a warning, a note on absence.

No one I know speaks about the ocean in the same way. It exists as part of our individual realities. For my mother it brought healing. It took the form of tears and washed-out stale words, dusty feelings. She floats in the ocean to escape. For me it brought freedom. To know the feeling of being unseen. Of having eyes everywhere but having none of them on you. But to have to be kind for survival, that was where it kept me grounded. Shook me back to reality and forced me to face the hand dealt by the real world.