Tidal Truth: The Ocean’s Unapologetic Power

The Pacific Northwest ocean doesn’t seduce. It tests. Stand on its shores and you’ll feel it immediately—this is not the warm lap of turquoise waters or the gentle invitation of calm bays. This is cold clarity, gray power, waves that hammer stone with the patience of something that has been doing this since before continents took their current shape. The ocean here doesn’t apologize for its temperature, its force, its relentless rhythm. It simply is, and in being so completely itself, it offers the rarest of gifts: the truth.

The Testing Ground

When I stood before that northern Pacific water, I understood why ancient peoples saw it as a gateway, a threshold that demanded something of those who approached. The ocean tests you not through malice but through honesty. It asks: Can you stand in the presence of something infinitely more powerful than you without collapsing or fleeing? Can you let cold water cleanse the accumulated debris of your thoughts? Can you be reset to zero, stripped back to essential self, without fighting the process?

The waves come in. The waves go out. Every single day. Every single hour. No negotiation, no compromise, no days off for good behavior. The ocean doesn’t care if you’re tired, if you’ve had a difficult week, if you need gentleness. It continues its work with absolute indifference to your readiness. And somehow this is not cruelty—it’s liberation.

Because the ocean shows us what we’ve forgotten: that true power doesn’t apologize, doesn’t second-guess, doesn’t pause to ask permission. It moves according to its own nature, responsive to moon and tide and the deep currents that connect all waters into one vast circulatory system. The ocean doesn’t wonder if it’s too much. It doesn’t dim its magnitude to make others comfortable. It simply flows in its own rhythm, and everything that enters it must learn to move with that flow or be broken against the shore.

Watching the power of the wave ride in at Ruby Beach-PNW

Wave as Practice, Tide as Teaching

Watch the waves long enough and you see the pattern we’ve abandoned in our frantic human lives. The wave gathers itself far out where you can’t see, drawing energy across miles of open water. It builds, accumulates, focuses its power into a rising wall of force. And then—release. The wave crashes, spends itself completely, holds nothing back. There is no hesitation at the moment of breaking, no self-consciousness about being too loud, too dramatic, too much.

After the crash comes the retreat. The water pulls back, gathering itself again, drawing a breath of ocean air. This is not defeat. This is not weakness. This is the essential rhythm: gather, focus, release, retreat, repeat. Endlessly. Powerfully. Without apology.

We have forgotten how to live this way. We gather but never release, holding tension in our shoulders until we become stone. Or we release without gathering, scattering our energy in all directions until we’re depleted and wondering why nothing feels powerful anymore. We’ve lost the tide’s wisdom—that true strength is rhythmic, that power flows in cycles, that you cannot crash with full force unless you also know how to pull back and rebuild.

The ocean doesn’t sustain one constant state. It pulses. High tide and low tide. Storm surge and flat calm. Spring tide’s extremes and neap tide’s moderation. It moves through its full range without shame, without the belief that one state is more acceptable than another. Imagine living that way—allowing yourself the full spectrum of your own tides, trusting that retreat is as sacred as advance, that pulling inward to gather yourself is not selfishness but necessity.

The Cold Cleanse

There’s something about cold ocean water that cuts through psychological static. Perhaps it’s the shock to the system, the way icy water forces you into the present moment with zero room for mental wandering. You cannot think about your anxiety while Pacific water numbs your feet. You cannot rehearse tomorrow’s worries while your breath catches from the cold. The ocean cleanses through radical immediacy.

In the Pacific Northwest, the ocean seems to specialize in this kind of reset. It strips away the accumulated layers of who you think you should be, what you think you should want, how you think you should feel. It reduces you to nerve endings and gasping breath and the primal understanding that you are a body, standing in salt water, alive right now. Everything else—every story you’ve been telling yourself, every identity you’ve been maintaining—dissolves in the cold.

This is the ocean’s gift when we allow it: not comfort, clarity. Not warmth, truth. It cleanses by removing what is unnecessary, leaving only what can withstand its power. Then what remains is always more real than what was washed away.

Unapologetic Existence

Here is what the ocean teaches simply by being: You do not need to diminish yourself to make others comfortable. You do not need to explain your power or justify your nature. You do not need to apologize for taking up space, for being cold when others want warmth, for being wild when others prefer calm.

The ocean is too vast to contain, too ancient to control, too powerful to predict with certainty. It kills and it feeds. It destroys coastlines and creates new beaches. It is simultaneously the source of life on this planet and the force that will reclaim everything we build too close to its edge, while it offers zero apologies for any of this.

We are taught the opposite from birth. Shrink yourself. Smooth your edges. Don’t be too intense, too passionate, too much. Apologize for your needs, your anger, your full-voiced truth. Modulate. Moderate. Make yourself digestible to others, so we do, and in doing so, we become stagnant pools instead of living ocean.

What if we remembered our own nature? What if we moved through the world like water—powerful in our flow, unapologetic in our force, rhythmic in our patterns of gathering and release? What if we trusted that our natural rhythm is not something to correct, yet something to honor? The ocean doesn’t consult others before the tide comes in. It simply moves according to the pull it feels, the laws it obeys, the nature it was born to express.

This doesn’t mean being cruel or careless. The ocean is not malicious—it’s neutral, moving according to its own truth without intent to harm or help. It also doesn’t stop being itself out of fear that its power might be too much for others to handle. There’s profound wisdom in this: You can be powerful without being aggressive. You can be strong without being violent. You can be unapologetically yourself without attacking others for being themselves.

The Sacred Exchange We’re Breaking

Yet, for all the ocean’s power, for all its unapologetic force, we are harming it. We are choking it with plastic, warming it past the tolerance of the creatures that make it their home, acidifying it with the carbon we pour into air that becomes water. The ocean—vast, powerful, ancient—is being damaged by our carelessness.

This is the paradox that should humble us: The ocean doesn’t need our reverence to exist, it needs our care to remain the living system it has been for billions of years. It will survive us, certainly. When humanity is gone, the ocean will still crash against shores, following moon and tide. Sadly, what we’re destroying is not the ocean itself—it’s the relationship, the exchange, the sacred balance.

The ocean offers so much. Salt that regulates our cells, minerals that built our bones back using the sea creatures. It generates more than half the oxygen we breathe through phytoplankton we’ll never see. It regulates climate, distributes heat, drives weather patterns that make land habitable. It provides food, medicine, energy, and beyond the practical—it offers perspective, power, cleansing, reset. It offers a mirror to our own capacity for depth and force and rhythmic flow.

What does it ask in return? Simply that we stop treating it like an infinite dumping ground, a convenient grave for what we don’t want to deal with. Not dramatic environmental activism necessarily—just basic recognition that we are part of a system, not separate from it. That what we pour into water comes back to us in fish we eat, air we breathe, weather patterns that shape our lives.

We don’t need to save the ocean. We need to stop destroying it. There’s a difference. One comes from ego—the idea that we’re powerful enough to save something infinitely more vast than ourselves. The other comes from humility—the recognition that we’re powerful enough to damage even great things, so we should be more careful with that power.

Becoming Ocean

The deepest teaching the ocean offers is this: You are already water. Your cells are saltwater oceans in miniature, carrying the chemical signature of ancient seas. Your blood is tidal. Your moods ebb and flow. Your tears are ocean leaving your body, salt returning to salt.

What if you lived like you remembered this? What if you moved through your days with the ocean’s unapologetic rhythm—gathering your energy when you need to build, releasing your power when it’s time to crash forward, retreating without shame when you need to rebuild? What if you stopped apologizing for your natural intensity, your cyclical nature, your depths that others can’t always fathom?

The ocean doesn’t wonder if it’s too much. It doesn’t hold back half its tide out of politeness. It doesn’t apologize for the cold that makes soft creatures gasp. It simply is, fully and completely, every single day.

You could be that too. Powerful in your truth. Rhythmic in your flow. Unapologetic in your nature. Testing what needs testing, cleansing what needs cleansing, resetting what’s become stuck in false patterns. Not because you’re trying to be like the ocean, because you’re remembering you already are—salt water and tide, depth and surface, calm and storm, all moving in service to something older than thought, truer than the stories you’ve been telling yourself about who you’re supposed to be.

The ocean is always there, breathing its ancient rhythm, offering the same teaching to anyone who will stand at its edge: Be wholly yourself. Flow in your own rhythm. Apologize for nothing that is true. And perhaps, while you’re at it, remember that you’re part of a system that needs your care, not your conquest. Honor what gives you life. Protect what cleanses and resets you. Respect the power that teaches you how to be powerful.

The tide comes in. The tide goes out. Every day. No apologies. Just truth, salt, and the magnificent practice of being exactly what you are.

written by Angela L. Holmes, Nervous System Intuitive™, Spiritual Energy Alchemist