The Pacific Ocean is audible from our condo. Not blatantly so; it was a week before we realized what we were hearing. Not constantly; the sound is obscured by passing cars or planes, and sometimes disappears when the wind dies. It is a low susurration, a faint background. I would call it an infrasound, except that I can hear it. I do like to think of it as the communication of a very large living thing, much larger than a whale or an elephant.

The Pacific is very much a presence in our lives here, as we wished, but not in the ways we expected. We see it when we turn down the penultimate street coming home, on the way to the library, from some restaurant windows and decks, and from roads over higher terrain. We see indirect indicators of it as well: surfers and surf shops, the dolphin symbols on our storm drains, sea-themed door knockers and welcome mats , and ubiquitous sand.

What we did not expect was the personification. Working at home with the ocean as a background, I find myself called to visit it. On the days I don’t get there, I feel both slightly bereft and slightly guilty, as though I had slighted it by not showing up. My husband has only the Bay for most of his day, yet he feels the pull of the ocean as well, often proposing a visit after dinner, and seeming completely content on a bench or rock looking at the ocean, sans book or device.

The Pacific seems like a creature and also like a biologic indicator of an even larger creature, Earth. I found myself imagining the regular actions of waves and tides as akin to Earth’s pulse and breath so often that I did some investigation and discovered the Schumann resonance. The positively charged ionosphere and negatively-charged surface of the Earth create a waveguide for the electrical activity of lightning, which strikes somewhere on the planet 100 times per second. The resultant planet-enveloping wave has a frequency of about 7.8 Hertz, discovered by the aforementioned Schumann in the 1950s. Many biological phenomena have similar frequencies, including the alpha waves of the human brain.

I love to muse about the “big picture”, and here I find endless inspiration for such thoughts. Perhaps not quite Life, the Universe, and Everything, but close enough.