An Unexpected Symphony

Aloha, I’m Ashley. I write about life through the lens of love, beauty, and creativity. If you find value in the magical and inspiration in the messy middle, subscribe to join the journey. Your footprints will be celebrated.

I wished for a rock that would pin me to the ocean floor so that my breath, not my buoyancy, would return me to the surface. But there wasn’t time; the sound was too beautiful to spend even a second searching.

The alarm sounded at 4:40 am and again five minutes later—such a short snooze. I wasn’t going to market that day, but I always get up with N to help pack the truck and offer caffeinated support in that dark hour. Except this day, he said, “I don’t want to go.” 

“Okay,” I answered and crawled back into the still-warm linen sheets. 

When light broke the dark a couple of hours later, the sky wore a flawless blue coat, and I had the overwhelming urge to go to the beach. 

“Let’s feed the dogs, make coffee, and head to the beach,” I said to N, his eyes still closed against the day. I’m often doing this, waking and zooming, when he requires significantly more time to shake off the haze of sleep. But on a Saturday, it’s important to get to this particular beach early before the swarm of sunscreened limbs and Tommy Bahama beach umbrellas dot the sand, not to mention the parking. 

“Mmmmph,” he said. “Okay.”

We were out the door shortly thereafter and scored primo parking.

Winter storms had sucked most of the sand from the beach, leaving jet outcroppings and hazardous conditions for inexperienced lava walkers. Enough had returned to cover the swimming area, but not so much that people could blanket the entire bay. We chose a perch with a footprint of sand, just big enough for our two chairs. Others chose similar roosts, dotting the rocks like a colony of sea lions.

Even though people arrived in droves over the next couple of hours, we felt isolated, surrounded by sharp, unwelcoming rocks and a small climb down to the water. The far crescent, the only solid swath of sand, looked like a Club Med with a line of blue umbrellas and matching chairs. 

Clouds descended early, playing hide and seek with the sun, leaving us just shy of warm. We weren’t rushing into the winter water.

I delighted in observing so many people, each with stories of their own, experience the crash of a wave, the sparkle of light on water.

A young father with his small daughter wearing a watermelon bathing suit sent her into waves twice her stature without any board. That little watermelon bodysurfed them, bouncing through the whitewater like a brave balloon; I was impressed. 

When it looked like the sun would stick around long enough to make the shock of the water bearable, we descended from our landing. 

There’s no getting around the impact of cold water. Wading is an exercise in self-torment,  eventually you just have to dive in. I took a wave head-on, diving under it and swimming off the nip of the ocean, writhing and wriggling my body to move the blood.

Surfacing some distance outside the break, I thought I saw the blow of a whale on the horizon, but I wrote it off as clouds. It’s late in the season; they’re not around so much as they were, these voyaging humpbacks. Or so I thought. 

On my next submersion, I caught the echo of whale song, faint in my quick plunge. Was that? I dove again. And again. They lit up the underwater stage — clicks, squeaky doors, blasting trumpets, baritone trombones. The syncopated sound stretched across molecules and landed squarely on wonderment.

I dove and floated back to the surface again and again, catching quick sips of air in between and trying, unsuccessfully, to find enough purchase in the fine sand to hold me under. I floated on my back, and wisps of song punctuated the slap of water against my ears. Eventually, I asked N to hold me down. He obliged, stepping on my back while I lay underwater, marveling at the sounds, wishing for gills. 

Whale song recorded off the coast of Hawai’i by the Jupiter Research Foundation

No one else noticed. They played in the breaking waves, oblivious to the symphony that surrounded us. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to shout to them all, Do you hear that? Those are whales. Put your head in the water. Isn’t it a miracle? But they were deeply ensconced in their own experience, and I stayed quiet, continuing my cycle of surface and submerge. 

One curious couple noticed me. They swam out past the break, where it was quiet, and I watched her dive. 

“Do you hear the whales?” I asked.

“Yes!” she said, “But we were wondering if they were dolphins.” 

“Oh no, those are definitely whales,” I told her, a huge grin on my face. “Big ones.” 

I’ve been going to this beach since I was single digits and have never heard whale song like this there before. Dolphins, yes, but not whales. We could have so easily missed it. Any one choice (of the many out-of-the-ordinary choices we’d made that morning) done differently would have eliminated the possibility of this gift. And yet. There we were. Swimming in whale song. 

Life is utterly temporal, yet we live as though it will never end. We are surrounded by the miraculous, yet we believe it is mundane. My favorite experiences all carry a common thread: they swell me with wonder. They carry me on the current of life, whole and complete, the perfection of it leaving nothing asunder. 

Life will burst us with beauty. It will lead us all the way into the miraculous. It will expose its wondrous nature.

When we let it.