I used to find myself torn between two worlds.
One with crashing waves and briny ocean air, and another filled with quiet lakes, rugged cliffs, and sprawling boreal forests. Summers by the sea gave me a saltwater soul; the rugged beauty of the Upper Midwest formed my deciduous bones.
Growing up by the coastline, the ocean was never just a backdrop.
She was always there through lazy afternoons in the sun, through the tides rolling in and out. I didn’t realize how deeply I belonged to her until I was gone, and I wish I hadn’t taken her presence for granted.
In spite of myself, the Atlantic taught me to let go, begin again, and find calm in the chaos of change.
When I left for Minnesota, I felt that absence more acutely than I expected.
The landscape was so different – no open shoreline, no salt in the air, no familiar sound of waves folding themselves back onto the sand. In its place were trees, frozen winters, inland waters, and a quieter kind of beauty that took longer for me to understand.
At first, it felt awkward.
Jarring, even. I missed the coast with an unexpected ache that sat just beneath everything. I missed the awe, the nearness of her.
Not the humidity.
I missed the way I could sit on her shores and talk to her. Minnesota was beautiful, but not yet mine. I struggled to acclimate because I didn’t yet know how to listen.
Little by little, I began to notice what this place was offering me.
The hush of the woods.
The rustle of leaves in Summer.
The stillness of lakes at dusk.
The dramatic cliffs of the North Shore.
The boreal forest pressing close around Lake Superior.
The way the light shifts here in Autumn, setting the whole world on fire before Winter takes it back. None of it was the ocean, but it began to reach me in a familiar place.
The rustling of trees, shimmering lakes, and fiery sunsets began to offer the same solace I had once sought by the sea. I noticed flora and fauna I’d never seen before, and found green spaces where I could commune openly with the elements.
I stopped looking for the coast inside the forest and started meeting this landscape on its own terms. Once I did, I found myself drawn into a beautifully different kind of relationship with the natural world.
The ocean taught me motion, surrender, and how to begin again after being undone.
The forest taught me patience.
It taught me how to stay, to listen longer and to let quiet do its work. The ocean moved with restless immensity; the forest stood rooted and watchful. Each knew something about transformation, and about what it means to endure.
Both asked me to pay attention.
And that’s when it finally shifted for me: they were never opposites in the way I thought they were – they were expressions of the same truth.
The ocean will always be a part of me. I don’t think that will ever change. She still lives deep in my body, in the place where salt air always feels like a homecoming and sunrises on wide, open horizons are what wake me in the mornings.
But forest has made a place in me, too.
So have the lakes, and the auroras that dance across the northern sky. So has the hush of snow, the smell of pine, and the roar of waterfalls in the rugged, fierce beauty of a place that once felt unfamiliar.
I don’t feel torn between them anymore, because I was never meant to choose.
I only have to remain open enough to let them keep changing me.