The Language of Tears

I came upon them by chance — three musicians setting up where the path meets the bluff, their instruments catching the last warm light. Someone had decided, without announcement, to give music to the afternoon.

I found a log and sat.

There were maybe twelve of us, strangers drawn by sound, some holding up their phones, some swaying slightly, all of us accepting this small gift the way you accept grace — quietly, without quite understanding why it was offered.

The sun was perhaps thirty minutes from the water. Its light had turned golden and generous, laying a path across the Pacific as if something on the other side had opened a door. And that is when it came over me — not gradually, but the way truth comes: all at once and undeniable.

I am in love with this ocean.

Not as a figure of speech. Not as the pleasant feeling one has standing before something large and beautiful. I mean the kind of love that has no dignity left in it, that does not know what to do with itself, that can only spill out the way it always has — down the cheeks, without permission.

I sat on my log and wept.

The music played on. Golden light made its slow path across the water. Strangers took their videos and swayed. And I could not stop looking at her — this vast, wild, living body — could not stop feeling how completely she holds me, how there is not a word in any language equal to what moves between us.

The musicians played beautifully. The late afternoon was perfect. But I was somewhere else entirely. I was just a woman on a log, crying at the ocean, hoping no one would ask why.

And the ocean, as always, said nothing. She didn’t need to.

This is what I have come to understand: beauty does not wait for us to be ready. It arrives — in unannounced music, in golden light, in a body of water so ancient it carries the memory of everything that has ever lived. And when it finds us, really finds us, we do not rise to meet it. We simply open. The tears are not sadness. They are recognition. The window had been there all along. I only had to sit still long enough to see that it was already open — and that I had always been standing inside it.

Unannounced music.
Golden path on water.
Twelve strangers.
One log.
Tears I could not explain
to anyone
but her.