The Ocean is a Wonderful Place

I went to the beach with my Mom and she told that the waves clean our spirit, they recalibrate our energy, something about our body being made up of water. Surely enough, as I floated in the Mediterranean sea, I could feel the waves work through the creaks of my heart and mind. How do you find stillness when you're surrounded by a body of water rising and crashing, pushing and pulling? You surrender to the currents. It's counterintuitive but when you tense your body up and resist the current, you'll swallow more salt than you could possible want. When you surrender to the ocean, when you let your body be moved by the waves, you'll effortlessly rise and fall with the ocean, you'll let the waves move through you. In the middle of a loud and moving world, in a life that won't stop living, if you stand in the way of the currents you'll create resistance between you and your experience that squanders energy unnecessarily, and holds you back from working with the circumstances you have no control over. You do however, have control over how you perceive and engage with these circumstances. Sometimes the ocean leads us exactly where we need to go, so we surrender; other times it leads us far from shore when we take surrender to mean passively accepting our roles as cogs in a machine or wave in an ocean. It's one thing to be a floating piece of drifting debris, it's another to be consciously aware yet nervetheless embrasive of the natural flow of the world around us. Sometimes its enough to rest patiently, to look up at the clouds and listen, to wonder about how the ocean moves as one, how it doesn't discriminate between a single wave and the next in the grand chain of waves circling the globe, all touching one another, pushing and pulling, crushing, dipping and cresting into one another, wandering if the sea has a spirit of its own.

My Mom told me that the ocean hears what your heart tells it, how it will respond to your love or frustrations in kind, or maybe embrace and heal you either way. That sounds nice but I wonder if nature lives and breaths without its creatures and plants to live and breath for it. If the depths of the ocean were to swallow me would the sand batt an eye? I don't know, but maybe the fish would enjoy the view, or the extra food hahaha. Other times we have to swim back to shore, find land again, rest, even then swimming with the waves, surrendering to their pull and launching as they push you ashore is far more graceful and effortless than working against the forces of nature.

I drifted to the side of the beach we were staying at, probably because the wind was flowing from the west to the east. I remembered a useful lesson, when you run towards something, ask yourself what it is you're running from. I ran for the cover of fantastical love, turns out I was running from falling in love with Myself. Even if you're just blowing towards something, asking ourselves honestly where we're blowing from can tell us alot about ourselves, put our lives in historical context. I felt a reluctant but moving urge to help a young lady of 24 to figure out whether marrying her 59 year old boyfriend was a good idea. The point of departure was a deep, unrequited sense of empathy held for a stranger. I have an unexplainable connection to the wellbeing of the living world. For me it feels inseparable from my own wellbeing, despite my detachment from the certainty or rigidity of a set outcome. Strangers we meet for a reason before going off on our own way, friends who open up in need of an empathetic ear, even animals who have been bruised in a bird cage. Call it selfish communal narcissism, call it a self-righteous superman syndrome, but I feel a need to love, heal with and help others however I can. Not to relieve some sense of guilt, or affirm some delusion of goodness that my help never really ensures, some title or identity I must cling onto, but because whether I want to or not, I feel a deep, human, and instinctive inclination to suffer and heal with the world; to do what I can if I can, when I can, to give way to the natural process of pressure and relief.

I sat on the beach and examined the coolest rocks I could find, Tried making a stone hedge thing with them but the ocean kept dragging the rocks away. I thought there was a certain kind of beauty and necessity to creating art that is neither meant to be immortalized nor publicized, art that was created with the sole intent of creation, that existed in beauty even if just for a moment, before the waves washed it away and gave way to something new. Before the ocean cleansed the sand for new generations of rocks. I wondered why I picked these rocks. If it was to be the king of the rocks, I'm sure the rocks wouldn't have noticed. My kingship would be a fragment of numerical imagination, secured only by a tally of rocks I have collected and sworn fielty to. How silly it is to collect rocks in a snow-globe, owning and imprisoning what can only ever end up owning an imprisoning us. Was it because I was adamant on finding the 'most beautiful' rock? I'd be a fool to believe the rock I found to be most beautiful had to hold a claim of objective beauty. My preferences don't downgrade the beauty of other things, nor are they supposed to be corroborated by the masses to be beauiful in my eyes. It's quite bizarre noticing how personal and self-anchored our voices are, that who we are needs neither to be actual (yet) not observed by others to be real. There are whole world in each of us, and only we hold the keys.