Signal Waves

Every transmission begins as a wave.
Radio, light, sound, tide—each one carrying information, each one moving through resistance. We’ve been thinking about that lately: how everything that reaches us must travel, bend, refract, lose strength, and still somehow arrive.

When we go to the ocean, we listen differently now. Standing on the shore, it feels like tuning a radio: the hiss of foam against rock, the long envelope of the tide rising and collapsing. Every wave is a message from somewhere else—weather, wind, the moon’s pull, a far-off storm translated into rhythm.

It’s impossible not to think of antennas, fiber optics, cell towers, all of them echoing the sea. Transmission is always a kind of longing. The signal leaves its source and hopes to be received.

We brought a small radio with us once, set it on a rock, and let it murmur while the waves came in. The static blended with the surf until it was hard to tell which was natural and which was made. It felt right—like the ocean was answering back.

All communication, in the end, is wave behavior: interference, harmony, reflection. The miracle is that we ever hear one another at all.