Shoreline Songs

It is a huge, flat stretch of sand, Bude, Cornwall. This particular day there was an onshore wind and the sizeable swell was all blown out and crashing around. There are few therapies better than to stand in front of this and yell. Guitar slung across my back, I took my leave of holiday pals for a little while.

At first, the plan was to find a quiet rock pool somewhere and hum ballads to diminutive sealife. Striding across the beach toward those frothy waves, there seemed to be many more people around than I had banked on—any people would be too many—and consequently, no quiet seclusion to claim. Really, apart from going home, there was nothing else I could do.

Because of the rhythm of crashing waves, because the seagulls get too excited on the gusts, because the rock strata in cliffs look like a musical score, because the elements were making so much noise and no one would hear me, and because I was wearing shades so no one would recognise me, I threw my bag down in an expanse of empty space, struck a chord, and started singing. I hurled my voice out there. Dogs kept bounding up, trying to bite the neck of my guitar and dropping tennis balls at my feet, so I hurled those aswell.

Standing with toes at the edge of the water singing the old Welsh hymn, 'Here is Love Vast as the Ocean' I nearly lost it, but everything else was singing so much better than me anyway, so here it is – I realise how everything in creation does this every moment without us, and if we just agree and go with it, it takes our songs and brings us in to a much, much bigger order of things. This is a primal sense of belonging.

That is, of course, until the embarrassment of turning around and realising an audience has gathered thinking I am busking U2 songs...


{Todays' Soundtrack: Cornish Fishermen's Sea Shanties}