sea and salt and reminders.

Note to self: Do not read Pat Conroy when homesick....also, don't watch Safe Haven while homesick. Double whammy for a soul whose veins flow with sand and salt and hot southern nights.

Sitting still, thoughts coming muddled with salty air, heart longing for nights drenched in star light and moonshine, filtered through heavy humid air. Mason jars filled with lightning bugs, like fairies caught with magic in their wings. Moss laden trees, pluff mud, and the echoes of a gray sea, caught up and tossed about in a lazy, hazy breeze. It begins a call through the caverns of a heart who forever echoes back the rising tides the call brings forth.

Steps taken in silver gray sand...wading through white foam, listening to gulls flying above. Lost in a place where time stops, held by ocean tides, long and wonderful and somehow lonely in all their fullness. Moments drug out, stretched long and wide, sweetened with food taken from salty water. It fills up a soul known to its shores, spilling over and out, and so we answer back. We are born and bred in salt and sand, their course running through our souls, etching lines across hearts and faces that are not at home unless breathing where horizon touches water.

And the sea imprints upon our hearts, softening the edges, creating souls that are forever torn in two. For to be born to the South is one thing, but to be born to her sea, to her Lowcountry that spans only a small shore line, this is an all together different thing. We hear her call every moment of every day, though we push it down, trying to silence the aching that wells up and spills over. Yet, it is always there, just below the surface. We may live many places, we may fall in love with them in different ways, but never will they compare to the way our souls still, the way they quiet when we finally go home. For to stand on her shore is the only place we can truly breathe. And unless you were born there, you cannot understand the deep and lasting mark we carry, forever branded by this place that will never let us go.

Our writers will try to express it to you...try to make you understand how this southern sea changes you. It is simply a place that is felt, that will only allow you to understand if you go looking for something. For its salt air heals many a wound wielded into hearts and souls who thought they would never be the same. Time alters there...it will slow into a crawl that only the south knows, becoming a balm that heals down deep through layers unknown. For the salt air seems to be a cure for things that cannot be seen, bringing forth much that we carry hidden away.

And it is in this place, in standing to gaze upon horizons that touch white capped waves, it is here that all that is born in my soul reaches up and above and beyond, gazing upon the face of a God who tenderly speaks through the crashing of waves upon steel gray shores. A reminder to a heart that beats with the ocean's rhythm,  that the aching is truly a deeper longing for the One who created it all.